As summer of 2021 was starting to approach and the pandemic was passing the one-year mark, Muirgen O’Mahony (pronounced Mur-en) was reaching a crossroads that forced her to seriously start considering whether she should give up her promising performing career for another line of work.
The young soprano from Cork County in Ireland was still fresh out of having spent a year studying musical theater at the Royal Academy of Music in London and had already landed several performances with the RTE Concert Orchestra at the city’s National Concert Hall. But COVID-19 had shuttered the theater industry, and her future in music looked uncertain at best.
“What’s kind of the most devastating thing is that as performers, you’re used to kind of setbacks. You’re used to long periods of time where you’re not necessarily performing and you’re in and out of jobs,” O’Mahony said in a mid-February phone interview. “But this was the first time ever that I was so financially just unable to keep going. And also in an already kind of oversaturated industry, the few jobs that were kind of coming up and running again seemed to be casting people who maybe would have been already in leads in the West End (theatre scene in London) and everything like that. So it just felt a little bit hopeless.”
What O’Mahony didn’t know at the time was something she had done fairly recently was about to change the entire trajectory of her career.
She had sung alongside Susan McFaddon with the RTE Concert Orchestra in London as part of their Winter Sessions series. McFaddon, a former member of the highly popular Irish vocal group Celtic Woman, thought O’Mahony would be a good fit in Celtic Woman and encouraged O’Mahony to apply for the group.
As a fan who had followed Celtic Woman and attended concerts by the group, O’Mahony did apply, never letting herself believe anything would come of it. But just when she was thinking her performing career was coming to an end, the Celtic Woman team contacted her.
She first recorded her vocals to instrumental recordings of actual Celtic Woman songs. This led to an invitation to travel to Dublin for an in-person audition, which O’Mahony, of course, did.
Then came an anxious — if mercifully short — wait.
“I got an e-mail about a week later saying I got the job,” O’Mahony said. “And I was hysterical for about 48 hours. There were tears, there was pacing the house just not knowing what was up and what was down.”
O’Mahony joins a lineup that includes Tara McNeill (violinist/harpist in Celtic Woman since 2016), Megan Walsh (who replaced McFadden in 2018) and original member, Chloe Agnew, who returned in 2020 as a guest vocalist for the 15-year anniversary tour that was cut short by the pandemic.
She joins an ensemble that has had history-making success in the world music genre. Originally assembled for a one-time concert television special, Celtic Woman saw that program picked up by PBS. It became a popular fund-raising program for the network and was then released on DVD.
That first concert DVD went on to sell more than a million copies, while the group’s self-titled first studio album topped Billboard magazine’s World Music chart for a record-setting 81 weeks. Celtic Woman has gone on to release a steady string of popular studio albums and concert DVDs — often paired together (such as the 2007 studio CD, “A New Journey,” and a concert DVD, “A New Journey: Live at Slane Castle, Ireland”). In all, Celtic Woman has sold more than 10 million CDs and DVDs.
For O’Mahony, her dream job of singing in Celtic Woman became decidedly real in a hurry. Three weeks after she was hired, she was in the studio recording the mix of classic Irish songs and more contemporary fare that make up “Postcards From Ireland,” the latest album from Celtic Woman.
Next came filming of the companion “Postcards From Ireland” DVD, which saw Celtic Woman make videos for the songs on the new album at a variety of scenic sites around Ireland. For O’Mahony, it was another new and memorable experience.
“It was kind of just like an incredible holiday going to places you’ve never seen before,” she said. “It was an incredible opportunity to get to bond with the girls and it was such an amazing opportunity to see parts of Ireland I’d never seen before.”
Now O’Mahony is having another new experience, performing live on a much bigger scale as part of Celtic Woman on a U.S. tour that visits more than 80 cities.
“It’s just like an overall spectacle,” O’Mahony said of the live show. “We have the dancers back with us, new costuming, new dances and obviously, we have the band as well. So we’re just so excited to get back out on the road and of course, bring (what) people are used to seeing in some ways, but also to give that extra bit of something new with the new album as well. And there’s a nice mix of kind of uptempo, some ballads and some traditional music as well. Yeah, it covers a huge scope of styles. It’s going to be great, hopefully.”
CONCERT PREVIEW
Celtic Woman
7:30 p.m. March 15. $43-$154. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 855-285-8499, foxtheatre.org.
About the Author
