Three tenors, one voice and a whole lot of good ol’ Irish times is what The Celtic Tenors encapsulate on stage and it’s all owed to their roots and who they are.
“What we do has developed so much from where we started that you almost have to be there to fully get what it is that we do,” said one of the tenors, Matthew Gilsenan.
He said they are no longer solely an Irish act, as they have grown into just doing great songs, which he said, have a bit of depth to them, but are also fun.
“What we have is a fairly live, off the cuff casual evening in terms that it’s not a terribly formal thing. It’s unscripted, it’s loose and we find ourselves hilarious,” he said with a laugh.
The spine of what they do, he said, is largely Irish to Scottish to folk, which branches out to North American folk music.
They’ll sing renditions of Celtic songs Danny Boy and classics like Nessun Dorma, along with Bob Dylan and Andre Boccelli.
“In our latest album (Timeless), we stretch things a little further, and we recorded a wonderful Martina McBride song called In My Daughter’s Eyes.”
The members, which include Gilsenan, James Nelson and Daryl Simpson, met in Ireland and all have very different backgrounds.
Gilsenan studied engineering in university, later becoming an engineer, but singing has occupied his time since an early age, part of the DNA in rural, Catholic Ireland.
“Everybody knows every single rebel song, every single other non-rebel song,” said Gilsenan.
He said when you sing as a young kid in Ireland, people will often say ‘you should get your voice trained.’
He later ended up taking a six month sabbatical from his engineering degree 18 years ago and met James Nelson, who was a full-time professional tenor singing around the world. Nelson had set up a three tenors group, to which Gilsenan was invited, which became more successful than they expected.
“James comes from a really verified classical operatic background. I came in more the side door. When I was 11 or 12 I was singing Leonard Cohen songs and my parents thought there was something wrong with me,” said Gilsenan.
The three lads came together and now have a global audience.
They first met on an opera stage singing Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss.
Gilsenan said he got into music from his connection with the church, singing at mass on Sundays.
After some of his aunts moved away to Sweden, leaving a load of records and a record player, which Gilsenan commandeered, he soon fell in love with the likes of Leonard Cohen, The Rolling Stones and more.
Gilsenan was steeped in the Irish tradition — from the fiddle to the accordion and all the famous old Irish tunes.
It was when he heard a duet by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill titled The Pearly Fishers that his eyes opened to the fact that there was a whole other type of music out there.
“I’m just a lover of music and a good song is a good song.”
The group’s Timeless album hasn’t been released yet officially in Canada, so the group will be selling it after their Sidney shows.
They plan to put together a new album, which Gilsenan said will be one of two things.
He referenced Ireland’s greatest tenor in the 1920s, John McCormack. McCormack sang some great Irish songs, songs that The Celtic Tenors avoided, because initially they thought they weren’t cool or weren’t really Irish or written by Irish people.
“We’ve been coming to the continent of North America for a good many years now and I think what we have come to realize is that even though many of these pieces weren’t written in Ireland, and they may not have been written by Irish people, they’re really loved by many people, including the Irish, and they have made them their own,” said Gilsenan.
He said album number 13 should be what they call ‘oirish,’ a pseudo Irish album, which is vitally Irish in a deep kind of way.
The second option for the next album would be pure opera.
The Celtic Tenors will perform Feb. 28 and Mar. 1 at the Mary Winspear Centre.
For tickets call 250-656-0275.