Celtic angels

Celtic angels

Four voices and one fiddle fire a fascination with Irish music.
By Phil Roura
New York Daily News
Posted March 25 2006

Irish music allows a wide variety of interpretations, from the defiance of the Clancy Brothers to the macho punctuation marks of Riverdance to the ethereal echoes of Enya. And then there's Celtic Woman.

Comprising four sopranos with velvet voices and a fiddler who'd make the legendary Irish musician Seamus Connolly turn green with envy, Celtic Woman rocked Americans a year ago with an eye-popping debut on PBS. If you haven't heard them, imagine Enya multiplied by four.

"It's been an amazing experience, one none of us could have predicted," says Meav Ni Mhaolchatha, who, like her singing partners, prefers to go by her first name.

"The way we've been accepted, especially in America, is astonishing," she continues. "If your roots are Irish, naturally there's going to be a connection. But it has gone wider than that. Our music seems to be very accessible to all people, and that's gratifying."

After the success of their television appearance, musical director David Downes decided to expand Celtic Woman's scope. They cut a CD, issued a DVD and found audiences as far away as Japan, which they visited last month.

On Tuesday they'll be at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale as part of their first tour of the States, a two-month, 33-city event, backed by a lush production, a full orchestra and a large group of backup singers.

"Our music is mostly traditional Irish music," says Meav, who gave birth to a daughter nine months ago and just returned to the group, which includes Orla Fallon, Lisa Kelly, the fiddler Mairead Nesbitt and 16-year-old Chloe Agnew. "Yet it's also contemporary."

The only flaw might be that the four singers sound so very much alike, but it's a minor one. From the moment Chloe sings Last Rose of Summer, audiences know they're in for something special. The feeling continues with Orla's Isle of Inisfree, Maev's Danny Boy, Lisa's Send Me a Song and Mairead's spirited fiddling in The Butterfly. When they sing You Raise Me Up together, the experience is magical.

No matter what song they perform, however, they don't stray far from their Celtic roots. "We sing about love and loss and identifying with country," Meav explains. "The music is simple and rural and of the peasant life. I guess because we are an island nation, the Irish have always held to our traditions through some very tough times."

After decades of strife, Ireland's Catholic independent south and Protestant British north appear to have settled into a peaceful coexistence. "In my youth we always hoped for a lasting peace," says Meav. "But when you saw [the Troubles] on the news it always looked a lot worse that it was. Certainly, we have to proceed with caution. But we're not political. We entertain."

Their music, however, is strictly controlled and administered by the young Downes, who decides the group's program. "We're always looking to bring new things to our program, but David is the one who makes the decisions," says Meav. "He is very secretive of what he wants us to do next. Right now it's traditional Celtic music with a lot of Irish instruments. But we are individuals and we have songs we want to include. We've been so busy that there has not been much time for new material [possibly some Elton John and Bono]. So we might have a private audience with him.

"You know," she adds in a lilting voice, "women in Irish culture have always been strong and very feisty."