Celtic Woman 'newbie' takes a bow

Tara McNeill is a violinist. Classically trained and an honors graduate from the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

But since she has started performing with an Irish music ensemble, slowly and perhaps a bit grudgingly, she's getting to the point where it's all right to call her a "fiddler."

"I don't really mind," she says. "In some aspects of the show I'd be a classical player, but then there are parts of the show where I'm running about, playing reels and jigs, so I'm a fiddler there. I'm both in the show."

The show, and the four-member ensemble, is Celtic Woman. McNeill will join her collaborators, Susan McFadden, Mairead Carlin and Eabha McMahon, onstage Wednesday at Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall.

McNeill, a native of Antrim, Ireland, is the group's newest member -- she joined in August just in time to record its most recent album, Voices of Angels. It's a sort of greatest hits compilation but with several new pieces, all with new major orchestral arrangements (suitable for the 72-piece Orchestra of Ireland that backed them on the album).

McNeill is, in fact, a triple threat -- she also plays harp and sings (though not, of course, while she has a violin under her chin). She's only the second violinist in the group's 12-year history, and its first member harpist.

It's not the violin that first took her into Celtic Woman's orbit. She played harp on Celtic Woman's 2015 public television special, Destiny.

"That was my first foot in the door," she says. "I've always admired the group, and just wanted to be involved in some shape or form.

"So when I got the call to play the harp, I jumped at it. I was very lucky, then -- a year from then, I was in the group as their violinist. It's been seven years since the group toured with a harpist."

The show consists of group and solo numbers; the four leads get two solos each, one in each half of the program. And "we have this amazing band, made up of drummers, lead guitar, pipes, whistles, things like that," McNeill says.

The show's four-month, 91-city tour, which started in February and runs to the end of June, is constantly just a little bit ahead of or just following in the wake of another major Irish-centered tour, the 20th anniversary of Riverdance -- often in the same venues and upon the same stage. (Riverdance was onstage at Robinson Center exactly a month ago, April 14-16.)

Is it possible to have too much of a good Gaelic thing? "I don't think so," McNeill says. "It's great to see fellow artists on the road. And it's great to see Irish music and dance doing so well."

Celtic Woman has been a big hit on American and Arkansas public television, where its videos are a fund-drive mainstay, and McNeill says she expects to see a lot of TV-inspired fans.

"We're very grateful for PBS for their support," she says. "They've played a very important role in Celtic Woman's success. They're some of our most loyal fans."

And McNeill, in her first tour with the group, is getting to visit a lot of the country she has never seen before.

"Oh my goodness, yes, we're getting to see so much of the United States. A new city almost every night," she says. And sometimes, she admits, she forgets where she is. "Definitely. I have to look at my tour app to see where I am today." The interview was by phone from Joliet, Ill.; the tour was next heading upstate to Rockford. "It's mostly one-night performances; most of the time, we do the show, travel that night, and arrive in the new city in the middle of the night or the next morning."

She's still enormously excited, however, that a longtime dream has come to fruition and the fast pace hasn't bothered her. "I'll sleep in the summer. In July," she says. "I'm absolutely loving my time with the group, and it's been a dream of mine to be a member of this group for a long time. So I can't see myself leaving any time soon."

Style on 05/14/2017