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Celtic Woman from left to right are Alex Sharpe,Lynn Hilary,Máiréad Nesbitt,Chloë Agnew and Lisa Kelly

PROVIDENCE -- A visit to Providence from Celtic Woman is pretty much an annual thing now, so you know what you're getting into: a big-budget, high-glitz performance by four crystalline sopranos (the current roster includes Chloë Agnew, Lynn Hilary, Alex Sharpe and Lisa Kelly) and a hot-shot fiddler (Máiréad Nesbitt), doing songs whose Celtic provenance ranges from not-at-all (Sting's "Fields of Gold"? Phil Collins's Disney ballad "You'll Be in My Heart"? Really?) to spot-on (mostly Nesbitt's instrumentals).

And Tuesday night at the Providence Performing Arts Center, at the first of the group's two-night stand, that's what they delivered. They came out with the "Songs From the Heart" disc in January, so there were some new additions to the set list, but in the big picture there weren't many surprises.

The usual highlights were still there: The interesting reharmonizations on the a capella "Danny Boy"; the rolling, joyous anthem "Mo Chile Mear"; Nesbitt's instrumentals, which not only showed off her prodigious technique but gave her the chance to play some squeals and howls that gave the night its moments of near-chaos (the good kind). As for the new stuff, the highlight was Jimmy Webb's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," a beautiful ballad sung by Kelly.

The one big difference was that the whole show, and the women in it, breathed a lot more than in performances past. Most people's first exposure to Celtic Woman comes from their PBS specials, and at far too many of their earlier performances, a listener could feel the phantom TV screen between the group and the audience. It's tempting to write it up to the smaller venue (they were at the Dunkin' Donuts Center last year), and there's certainly something to that, but their earlier PPAC performances felt kind of freeze-dried as well.

That wasn't a problem last night. For the first time, there was more than one perfunctory address to the audience (Hilary's explanation of "Dulaman" as a song of comparing two lovers to pieces of seaweed was the most entertaining). "Amazing Grace" began with the bagpiper starting in the back of the room and heading up the PPAC aisle. And the singers' dancing -- well, it's still a bit of a stretch to call it dancing, but it looked and felt a lot looser, a lot more spontaneous, particularly in Agnew's case.

It's still Celtic Woman, and so you still get a preponderance of heavy ballads ("You Raise Me Up," naturally), full of synthesized strings, echoing percussion and voices, hooky-spooky minor chords and post-Riverdance, easily digested Celtic cultural touchpoints. There are still those unforgivable wind chimes and the story-song hokum of "At the Ceili." But the group has got their live-performance chops down a lot better than on previous visits.



By Rick Massimo
11:04 PM Tue, Mar 09, 2010
The Providence Journal Co
Providence, RI

Beautiful photo