The Irish ensemble known as Celtic Women performed a post-holiday concert at Mohegan Sun on Sunday night.
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Mairead Nesbitt of Celtic WomenUNCASVILLE, Conn. -- Hoping to extend the St. Patrick’s Day celebration by a day, the Irish ensemble known as Celtic Women performed a post-holiday concert at Mohegan Sun on Sunday night. The group offered up a two-hour, two set show in the casino’s arena.
Celtic Women is a vocal group franchise thrown together in 2004 to cash in on the enormously popular Riverdance stage show. The interchangeable singers offer up traditional Irish songs along with Celtic-tinged modern tunes.
The group gained its own measure of stardom based largely on staged concert productions that were recorded and aired on PBS. Those airings netted the producers platinum records and sold-out concert halls.
The Mohegan Sun show was well short of a sellout, with the upper tiers of the arena nearly empty. The vacancy was surely due, at least in part, to the group playing the previous night at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford.
This current touring version of Celtic Women features one original singer (Chloe Agnew) and fiddler Mairead Nesbitt (another original) along with newly added vocalists Lisa Lambe and Susan McFadden. Nesbitt has the best agent of the group considering she was out for only a half-dozen or so songs throughout the evening.
The workload fell to Agnew whose beautiful voice carried the evening on songs like “Nocturne” and “A Woman’s Heart.”
Each of the three singers had spotlight moments with McFadden leading the way on “Sailing,” and Lambe earning an ovation for “A Spaceman Came Traveling.”
The highlight of the first set was the trio’s rendition of “Danny Boy,” and the set closing “Mo Ghile Mear” which featured the trio, six backing singers, and Nesbitt.
After a 20 minute intermission, the second set began with a stirring version of “Amazing Grace,” started by a lone bagpiper who walked from the back the arena to the stage before the singers joined in on the song.
The crowd was implored by Agnew to sing along on the Robert Burns penned “Green Grow the Rashes” before McFadden led the group in a tribute to Broadway that featured a rather sterile version of “The Circle of Life,” from “The Lion King.”
Agnew’s rendition of “Ave Maria” was one of the stronger performances of the evening and led into the set closing “The Parting Glass” which again featured the entire company.
