By Jeff Meade

"Have ya no homes to go ta?" Ronan Browne cried out in mock protest. But the more than 100 traditional music fans who had spent almost two hours listening to what amounted to a master class by uilleann piper Browne and headliner Peadar O'Loughlin, the legendary Clare fiddler-flutist, would have none of it. So the music went on for nearly another half-hour, with the appreciative Irish Center crowd—many of them Philadelphia-area session musicians—standing in applause and admiration at the end.

It was a night of reels and jigs, furtive foot-tapping, rhythmic head-nodding—a traditional Irish musical feast, seasoned by Browne's puckish humor. Many of his witticisms were self-directed. And at his pipes, too, with which he wrestled much of the night. As he started to tear apart the plumbing between sets, trying to coax an uncooperative drone back into tune, he kept up a muttering commentary on his progress. "It's a little trick I learned," he told them. "It's called fascinatin' the audience." At other times, as he effected more minute repairs, he seemed like a man disassembling an unexploded bomb, perhaps one that had unfortunately dropped into the middle of a mine field, adjacent to the convent full of blind cloistered nuns. "Will the members of the audience kindly stop breathin'," he whispered, and then, almost as an afterthought,  " ... just for a while."

For his part, O'Loughlin smiled indulgently while all this was going on, pausing now and again to play tantalizing snatches of tunes on his fiddle while he patiently waited for his partner to persuade the pipes to behave.

But most of the night was given over to music, not musical comedy, performed by two supremely skilled craftsmen. At times, O'Loughlin and Browne succeeded in sounding like an entire session full of fiddlers and pipers—and for one brief interlude, a fairly good-sized flight of flutists. O'Loughlin played with a purity and precision that would be the envy of a great many players, with subtle, masterful and joyful expression. Browne's pipes proved the perfect counterpoint to O'Loughlin's fiddle—but that case was already been proven beyond doubt on two previous CDs, "The Southwest Wind" (1989) and "Touch Me If You Dare" (2002).

The duo charged through endless sets, tunes flying by in a kind of blur—the Curragh Races, the Swallow's Tail, the Rolling Wave, Kiss the Maid Behind the Bar, Farewell to Connaught, the Five-Mile Chase, and on and on.

As a bonus, they were joined for several sets by fiddler Willy Kelly, who added his own sparks to the performance before retiring to much applause. But the evening belonged to Peadar O'Loughlin and Ronan Browne.

Through it all, the younger player and his more reserved elder colleague cruised along with apparent effortlessness, laughing unselfconsciously at the occasional flub or miscue, communicating tune changes with a subtle arch of Browne's eyebrows or a lift of O'Loughlin's foot, each man obviously enjoying the company of the other.

For those who were there, it was a memorable performance. For the benefit of those who were not, however, we offer a photo essay, a sound file and our first video webcast.

• Photo essay
• Video webcast