Celtic Woman doesn't have a new CD or DVD to tour behind this year. So what will the Irish-rooted vocal group have to offer? Essentially, nothing but its best.
“It’s a beautiful show,” Celtic Woman singer Lisa Lambe said in a recent phone interview. “And it’s a show that’s a celebration of the best of Celtic Woman. I suppose it’s almost like the greatest hits down through the years and songs that people will know very well, songs I think they’ll want to sing along with, or at least I hope they will — songs like ‘Orinoco Flow,’ ‘You Raise Me Up,’ ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ and then we have some beautiful classics that I don’t think any Celtic Woman concert or performance can be complete without, songs like ‘Danny Boy,’ which for me are some of the highlights and the moments that I enjoy best when I’m performing the show.”
Judging from the continuing success of Celtic Woman, the group, which is backed by a full band and choir in concert, has created an elaborate live show that appeals to a large audience. The group will perform two shows at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center on Saturday, June 8, to cap this season's Broadway Play Series.
Originally, Celtic Woman was created for a one-off television special filmed in Ireland, and musical director David Downes and producer Sharon Bowne essentially recruited four singers — Orla Fallon, Chloë Agnew, Lisa Kelly and Méav Ni Mhaolchatha, along with fiddle player Máiréad Nesbitt — to perform that single concert.
Instead, PBS picked up the film of that performance, and it became a popular fundraising program for PBS in spring and summer 2005. This helped pave the way for the release of the show as a concert DVD that sold more than 1 million copies. Meanwhile, the group’s self-titled first studio album topped Billboard magazine’s world music chart for a record-setting 81 weeks.
By then it was clear that Celtic Woman had a big future, and the organizers had hit on a musical formula with wide appeal by mixing traditional Irish songs with a little light classical, pop standards (the repertoire has included Bobby Darin’s “By The Sea,” the Josh Groban hit “You Raise Me Up” and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”) and even a few tunes from musicals and movies (such as “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”).
The group has gone on to release three more studio albums, 2007’s “A New Journey,” 2010’s “Songs from the Heart” and 2012’s “Believe,” each of which was accompanied by a live DVD.
The success has been sustained as the lineup has seen Kelly, Fallon and Mhaolchatha leave, and singers Alex Sharpe, Lynn Hilary and Hayley Westenra arrive and then depart. Today’s lineup features vocalists Agnew, Lambe (who joined in 2011) and Susan McFadden (who joined in 2012), as well as Nesbitt.
Lambe (pronounced “Lamb”) said she will have two solo performances during this year’s show. One will be a traditional Irish song, “Dulaman,” which tells the tale of a young woman who is torn between two suitors. The other is the Simon & Garfunkel classic, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
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