Brian O’Donovan was the kind of man who, even if you met him only once, immediately felt like an old friend. So, no surprise that those who loved him and the Celtic music he presented turned out in force on Saturday night, filling Symphony Hall for a special Boston Pops concert, Celtic Night: A Tribute to Brian O’Donovan and A Celtic Sojourn.

And if anybody who knew him over the years had missed the point that the most important part of his life was his family, his wife Lindsay and daughters Aoife and Nuala there and all featured in the program. As was Paula Plum, who helped him stage nearly all of his Christmas Celtic Sojourn productions and was hosting this show. As was Séamus Egan and the members of his long-time the band, Solas. As were a great wave of Irish step dancers choreographed by Ashley Smith-Wallace. And yes, in true Brian O’Donovan fashion, each half of the program ended with dazzling footwork displays, including by some of the littlest dancers to have ever learned a jig.

This concert, though, was not just about savoring memories. Under the baton of Eímear Noone, The Boston Pops joined with Solas to present an evening filled with the rich sampling of Celtic music that O’Donovan presented over his 37-year run as presenter and producer of WGBH’s weekly radio program, A Celtic Sojourn.

That said, the evening opened with a poem offered like an invocation by Paula Plum. Indeed, another of O’Donovan’s passion was poetry.  Throughout the evening, poems by Séamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, Michael Coady and Arthur O’Shaughnessy enhanced the music.

“We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams,” O’Shaughnessy wrote in 1873. And with that, Solas and the Pops let loose with the rousing traditional Irish drinking song Níl na Lá. No sooner had it segued into the reel, Toss the Feathers, when Ashley Smith-Wallace and Conor O’Brien burst onto the stage in a fury of step dancing and high kicks. There is no better way to raise the temperature of any audience, let alone one where many were wearing something green and even the pipes of Symphony Hall’s organ glowed emerald by times.

The Pops seized on that enthusiasm as they played the gentle, baroque-sounding Planxty Burke, a song written three centuries ago by the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan and arranged by Berklee College’s Michael Starobin. It was followed by another of O’Carolan’s compositions, Loftus Jones, with Solas adding extra power.

Moira Smiley, a long-time Solas singer, took the lead on Silver Dagger, a ballad which Noone noted “has its roots in Ireland from where it traveled to America where it developed its own musical identity.” As such, she said, it was, “like Brian, a son of Boston and a son of Ireland, who was a bridge between two cultures.”

Paula Plum read an excerpt from Séamus Heaney’s Clearances, recalling the simple things that have the most meaning, with the lines that famously begin, “When all the others were away at Mass, / I was all hers as we peeled potatoes…”  Solas sustained the mood with A Tune for Roan, a dream-like piece that floated on harp arpeggios by the Pops’ Krysten Keches that evoked the mythical creature, the selkie. Ashley Wallace-Smith added extra grace with a balletic-accented dance of fluid gestures that underscored the longing heard in a solo violin by Winifred Horan and Egan on guitar. That sense of timelessness, however, dissipated instantly when Solas with the Pops broke into Hugo’s Big Reel, a tune by Egan that had the audience clapping vigorously.

Then it was time from Grammy-winning daughter Aoife O’Donovan to bring three songs she had sung for her father, as well as for her growing world-wide audience. On the first, The Lakes of Pontchartrain, she was joined by violinist Jenna Moynahan. Her voice went from a holler to a whisper in the space of a phrase as she brought to life this moving tale of human kindness in the Louisiana of the American Civil War. She demonstrated why this song has been sung by Irish balladeers ever since.

In her mid-calf, shamrock-flocked green silk dress, she looked the personification of all that is Irish as she offered Magic Hour, a song of her own that draws on the times she spent with her father’s family in Clonakilty, County Cork. It presents images of a “turf cutter’s donkey” and “fairy children that run around but make no sound.”

She ended her set with Paul Brady’s I am a Youth That’s Inclined to Ramble. Brady, originally from Northern Ireland, was a member of Planxty, a group of young musicians who in the early 1970’s set the Irish traditional music revival in motion. This arrangement by Sean O’Laughlin has the sweep and majesty of the powerful by rarely performed works by Belfast-born composer, Shaun Davey, who was profoundly influenced Planxty went on to create a large body of work incorporating traditional Irish instruments into orchestral settings. In Irish music, things go in these kinds of circles.

A reading of the closing lines of Yeats’ Among the School Children, brought on four very young dancers – Katelyn Gagliard, Evelyn Scuderi, Emersyn Connolly and Carolyn Magee – who tore up the stage as the Pops with Solas rounded out the first half of the program stepping to a series of spirited polkas. For long-time Christmas Celtic Sojourn goers, it was lovely to hear Paula Plum share Brian O’Donovan’s timeless announcement that “we will have “a five-minute break for ten minutes, See you back in fifteen.”

In an echo of the years when Arthur Fiedler programmed an Irish Night in every Pops season, Eímear Noone led to orchestra in Leroy Anderson’s arrangement of The Rakes of Mallow, part of his Irish Suite, not played so much anymore but all the more delightful to hear it once again because of that. Noone, who shuttles between Dublin and Los Angeles, has made her name and garnered awards for her compositions for video games. Hers is a different world from Fiedler’s, and yet it is hard not to think he would have been fascinated by it.

Aoife O’Donovan returned with a song she has written, Peace of Wild Things, based on a poem by Wendell Berry, whom she said was one of her father’s favorite American poets. This poem carries a message of hope in difficult times with “the day-blind stars waiting with their light.”

Her sister, Nuala O’Donovan, joined her on the song, Gypsy, by Suzanne Vega that their father enjoyed. Nualla, with an equally shimmering voice, took the lead with Aoife harmonizing. The two blended so beautifully, that there has to be an album of sisterly duets in their future. It was Nuala’s first time performing on the Symphony Hall stage. Watching and listening to them, you just knew how proud their father would have been to see there on this stage this night. It’s the kind of sentiment that is entirely allowed, and which you cannot help feeling, at a Brian O’Donovan event.

Heaney’s Postcript is as visual a poem as has ever been written, with lines like “The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, / Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white.” As with the other poems she read, Paul Plum brought all her dramatic gifts to make these words soar and resonate, and none more beautifully than these.

Lindsay O’Donovan, who cherished 43 years with her husband until brain cancer took him from us, came on stage to perform a waltz she has written for him. As she often did for his shows, she played the piano, solo at first, then softly joined one by one by the members of Solas. So sweet. So romantic. Lest the mood get too sentimental, the tempo then picked with a tune by Egan, Who’s in the What Now? It was accompanied by an explosion across the stage of dancers Ciara McDonagh and Kayleigh Naumann from the Keane O’Brien Academy of Irish Dance. More Riverdance than traditional step dancing, these two young ladies totally energized the crowd.

Egan shared a story that over the years as he worked with Brian to prepare the Christmas Celtic Sojourn programs, Brian was always concerned lest there not be enough fiddlers. As many as Egan brought into the show, Brian was looking for more.

“Tonight,” said Eagan, “with Bonnie Bewick (first violinist of the BSO), Winifred Horan (of Solas) Jenna Moynihan, and the entire string section of the Boston Pops, this is the fiddle feature that Brian dreamed about.” With that they broke into the traditional Jig Time, with the three featured lady fiddlers center stage creating a viscerally exciting micro-climate of sound when the others briefly dropped out.  

There was one more poem to be read. Michael Coady’s touching There Are Also Musicians with its insistence that the power of music makers is ultimately stronger than the wrongdoing of the worst among us. It was always featured in the final moments of A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.

As the cast assembled on stage to receive the thanks of the audience, Aoife O’Dovan led them in the singing of Wild Mountain Thyme, another O’Donovan favorite. Originating in Scotland, and made hugely popular in Ireland by the Clancy Brothers and others, this song typifies the “roots and branches of Celtic music,” that Brian O’Donovan celebrated week after week. No surprise that many in the audience sang along, with more than few dabbing their eyes.

And with Solas giving a stirring grand finale with An tÉan ar an gCrann, the cheering shook the rafters. Its members, Winifred Horan, Moira Smiley, John Williams, and Alan Murray along with Egan, were joined by guest artists Québecois guitarist Yann Falquet and banjo player Greg Liszt.

In a week when terrible clouds are hanging over Symphony Hall, this special Celtic Sojourn brought a sunshine that demonstrated that this beloved space can yet again be a place of unfettered joy.

Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.