Imagine a hall on whose walls hang framed photographs of every Irish artist, both living and dead. The number of artists is too great for the hall, so some photographs hang on top of others — James Joyce’s left eye is eclipsed by Seamus Heaney’s shoulder; Sinéad O’Connor looks as if she’s muttering sweet-somethings into Bono’s ear.
Scholar Wes Davis puts it another way. In his introduction to “An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry,” he writes about Ireland’s poetic and artistic output, the volume of which is so miraculous “given the small size of Ireland — the island has roughly the population of Tennessee in a land the size of South Carolina.”
Irish music ensemble Celtic Woman is a product of this South Carolina-sized state, and a fixture on the thought-up hall of artists. The group, made up of vocalists Chloë Agnew, Lisa Lambe and Susan McFadden and violinist Máiréad Nesbitt, was recently named Billboard Magazine’s No. 1 World Music Artist, and will close its North American tour on June 16 at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.
“American audiences tend to like a lot of the traditional numbers, which are very lively,” says the group’s fiddler, Nesbitt, a former student of London’s Royal Academy of Music and the Trinity College of Music, London.
“They like the numbers sung in Irish even though audiences don’t know what they mean. No matter what nationality the people are, they latch onto our lively group numbers because they are fun.”
Celtic Woman’s success is a realization of the ensemble’s prophetic 2004 start.
Brought together almost a decade ago by a former musical director of “Riverdance,” David Downes, Celtic Woman taped a performance in Dublin in September 2004 for PBS television. The performance, which aired in the U.S. in early 2005, was, in a way, the group’s announcing its musical ferocity and sure-to-be worldwide acclaim; since then, Celtic Woman’s albums have sold more than 7 million copies, and 3 million fans have bought tickets to see the group perform live.
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