"seamless, ethereal sean nós voice"
The Irish Echo

"It is singing a cappella that Caitríona O'Leary is at her most moving and where she best presents a very rare and very lovely repertoire."
Le Monde de la Musique

"[O'Leary's] caressing tones ... fit seamlessly into a consistent fabric of sound and expression"
The Wall Street Journal

"The gentle tones of Caitríona O'Leary were lovely"
The Boston Globe

"Her voice exudes beauty ... The songs were frenetically celebrated by a carefree and cheerful audience. The élan of O'Leary's impressive presence simply cannot be escaped."
Mittelbayerische Zeitung

"Do not hesitate for a second! Caitríona O'Leary has one of those incredibly crystalline voices that roots you to the spot"
La Vie

"downright angelic"
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Her singing style, clear articulation, and beautiful soprano voice - with or without accompaniment - are brought to great effect in these and all the songs in Dúil"
Irish Music Magazine

"I relished the flavors of the individual voices and characters ... the focused calm of Caitríona O'Leary"
Boston Bay Windows

"Spreading a poignant pall over the proceedings, O'Leary's lamenting voice rose and fell flawlessly, entrancing the audience with heart-wrenching songs."
The Irish Echo

"Vocal grace, majestic formal fluidity, from traditional Irish ballads to early music: a disc (Dúil, Irish Songs of Love and Nature), which unites tradition and sensuality"
Geo

"Here is a disc (Dúil, Irish Songs of Love and Nature) that revels in the joy of singing and of making music and the joy of being alive"
La Marseillaise

"Wonderful interpretation by Caitríona O'Leary and her band"
Femme Actuelle

"This CD (I am Stretched on your Grave) instantly had me enchanted. These songs go straight to the heart - and do so compellingly. Wow! It simply cries out for more!"
Alte Musik Aktuell

"She deliberates with great magnitude and with repose. Spellbindingly she sings like a spiritual medium of Irish mourning songs and traditional dirges. Heart-rending cries of simple beauty - but pleasant, autumnal cries that appeal to melancholy and reflection, rather than to misery and lamentation. Besides, all 19 songs are outstandingly presented."
Music: very good - excellent
Sound: very good
Scala

"The intense lamentation is accomplished through a purity of sound and sincerity of emotion - With each additional overtone one hopes to discover a glimmer of hope. O'Leary is a thoroughly unsentimental singer. She thus succeeds in depicting the true magnitude and power of death, while conjuring up those forces of Eros and Thanatos that can be traced farther back than Christian tradition to the pagan roots of Celtic culture."
Deutschlandfunk - Die Neue Platte

"Sung by Catriona O'Leary, tremendous. You simply have to like it."
Rondo

"[I am Stretched on Your Grave:] a walk through the valley of tears could scarcely be more poetic."
Musik & Theater

"The clear voice, like a flowing river, and gracious silhouette, of Caitríona O'Leary has also accompanied the ensemble Sequentia and the Harp Consort"
Valeurs Actuelles

"[O'Leary] creates an elegiac atmosphere with her clear voice and authentic Gaelic pronunciation"
The Plain Dealer

Irish Music Magazine, October 2001
Aidan O'Hara
Review of Dúil, Irish Songs of Love and Nature

This CD of Caitríona O'Leary's echoes what it says on the package: she sings Gaelic songs of love and nature, and for added enjoyment, her group, Dúlra, supply a number of dance tunes. As she points out in the CD notes, "These songs reflect a deep affinity with the land and its creatures and the seasons: praising the characters of the different trees, reading omens in the behaviour of the elements, longing for the leafy summer, comparing the beloved to the birds, the flowers, the stars, and shunning solicitous invitations to the shady woods."

The notes also point out that the Gaelic word Dúil means a creature or living thing, and that, "It also means desire, longing, and hope." All these sentiments are found in the songs, and one might add that there's humour, too, seen in Caitríona's first number, the silly song, Cearc agus Coileach (Hen and Cock), which tells the tale of the demise of a fine rooster who ended up on the dinner plate. His companion laments, "The father of my brood and spouse of my bed/ Stretched out in a pot with a lid on his beak."

Carolan the harper (1670 - 1738), is famous for his beautiful airs, but people forget, perhaps don't even realise, that he was also a poet and set his verses to music; on this CD Caitríona sings two of them, Réalta na Maidne and Ceann Dubh Dílis. Her singing style, clear articulation, and beautiful soprano voice, with or without accompaniment, are brought to great effect in these and all the songs in Dúil.

While Caitríona has a great love of Irish traditional songs, she actually specializes in music of the medieval, renaissance, and baroque periods, and has performed with ensembles like The Harp Consort and Sequentia. Her group, Dúlra, is made up of uilleann piper/flute player, Christopher Layer, fiddle player, Robert Mealy, bass player, Jay Elfenbein, and bodhrán/bones player, Mel Mercier. In this production Caitríona O'Leary and Dúlra present a successful and pleasing melding of pure tradition and concert performance.

Irish Music Magazine, September 2001
Aidan O'Hara
Interview with Caitríona O'Leary

Caitríona O'Leary's new CD "Táim sínte ar do Thuama - I am Stretched on your Grave" (BMG Classics) was released recently. Aidan O'Hara talks to her about it and her singing - she has a unique way with Irish traditional and medieval songs.

"I'm a sort of itinerant from birth - always travelling. In fact, my parents were living in a caravan on the side of the road in Donegal when I was born," singer Caitríona O'Leary says with a laugh. And before you respond with ohs and ahs at the romance of it all, she quickly adds that it was a temporary little arrangement while their house was being built; still, any romantic reaction isn´t entirely out of place, because the house was located near a cliff overlooking scenic Muckross Bay.

I met with Caitríona in Temple Bar recently to talk about her latest album, "Táim sínte ar do Thuama - I am Stretched on you Grave" (BMG Classics). As the title of this new CD suggests, she sings laments in the Irish language - 19 of them. She's a tall (5'11") slender, striking-looking young woman, and could easily pass for one of those international top-flight models one sees gracing the covers of countless magazines on the shelves of corner stores and newspaper shops everywhere. Caitríona is the very epitome of confident, modern Irish womanhood, and now, with a 10-month-old boy, is full of the joys of motherhood and marriage.

Donegal was Caitríona's home until she was three and then the family moved, first to Canada for a few months, then to Athy, next to Carlow, then Limerick, and finally Dublin. "I lived in thirteen houses before I was thirteen years old," and she laughs again. So, when people ask her where she´s from, what does she say? "I say I was born in Donegal, because I love Donegal, and it's easier. But all my teenage years were in the Dublin suburbs."

Caitríona explained that her father was from Graiguenamanagh in Co. Kilkenny where the family ran a bakery, but that he chose not to continue in the business and became an electrical engineer. It was his work that took him to Donegal for three years before moving on, and on again, to other parts of Ireland after that.

Her music studies took 'a formal and informal direction' from her earliest years. Her mother's family were brought up with classical music, while her father's family were steeped in traditional music. He's a flute player. "My father, grandfather and uncles were in the Graiguenamanagh Céilí Band, although the O'Leary's were originally from Wexford." She went to secondary school in Malahide, but says that just as many hours were spent studying piano, violin and recorder in the College of Music in Chatham Row in the city.

In recognising that Riverdance had a particular impact in making Irish music and dance 'much more mainstream', Caitríona revealed that she was, in fact, one of the founding members of the group Anúna who gained wider prominence through their participation in the Riverdance performance in the famous interval session in the Dublin Eurovision contest in 1994. She was also in the National Chamber Choir.

The travelling bug had truly taken hold in spite of all those moves in her young life, and while still in her teens, Caitríona headed for New York. "That's where I developed my singing career," adding quickly with a chuckle, "and my waitressing career." Still laughing she continued: "I finished up my music degree in Brooklyn College, having first studied for a while in Trinity College Dublin. I was far too young when I entered TCD at the age of sixteen."

Caitríona admits that it was only when she moved away that traditional music began to mean something to her. "When you're a teenager growing up, you react a bit against it. I began to realise that it really meant a lot to me and was so much part of my heritage. I began to gain an appreciation and a love of Irish music. I started to take it much more seriously then, of course."

"In New York, I sang in various church choirs, getting up at an ungodly hour on Sunday mornings," she said, and I didn't advert to the unintentional pun, as she went on: "We sang very beautiful renaissance and baroque choral music. And I used to sing for funerals about three times a week. Actual hands-on keening, what?" It all helped to pay the rent. "It was a pretty modest living, supplemented by waitressing a lot of the time." She has a nice line in self-deprecating wit, has Caitríona, and a delightfully attractive trait it is, too.

Eventually she got a break when she was invited to join Sequentia, the early music ensemble, specialising in medieval singing. With Sequentia, she performed the works of Hildegard Von Bingen and Aquitanian polyphony. "That whole experience has absolutely coloured my life and my singing. I also made a recording called "Carolan's Harp" with the Harp Consort. I had the job of finding all the texts material that went with the harper's music; it was fascinating. We toured sporadically with that over the years."

In New York, she auditioned for a stage version of Handel's Messiah and was successful. "It was an outrageously stunning production, fully staged, contemporary costumes, dancers, etc." The young producer/director was an American of Danish ancestry called Eric Fraad; they fell for one another and eventually married.

Caitríona and Eric returned to Ireland a year ago because she wanted to have her baby at home. They now have a ten-month old boy, the well and truly named Dáibhid Buffett George Frederick O'Leary Fraad. She added quickly that they call him Davy for short! "He was born at home in our apartment in Temple Bar in Dublin - he came so fast."

After almost ten years in NY, she wondered what life would be like in Dublin. It's working out just fine, she said, and added, "Now it looks like it might be permanent." Has she been able to pursue her singing career in the meantime? "I haven't been singing much in public since I came back to Dublin - since the baby was born. I'm busy being a mother. I sing in the kitchen, and he's very appreciative and sings along!"

Motherhood obviously agrees with her because she looks wonderful. She'd love to sing again but will have to find a way of combining a career and motherhood. "There's a performance I do which Eric directs, and it's really wonderful. Rather than just the classical style, just standing and singing, it's staged in a theatrical manner with lights and sound. We'd love to get that staged some time."

Returning to her new CD, she observed that the songs she selected for the recording are ones that appealed to her a lot. "The new album is a collection of laments and I'm really happy and proud of the recording. I hope that it's the first of three, because I've wanted to do the three major song groupings of the ancient Irish: goltraí (sad songs), geantraí (laughter-provoking music) and suantraí (lullabies). The goltraí which I've just done have really haunting melodies, because for me, melodies is what it's all about. My performance of them has been informed by my experience with medieval song, and that's how I understand them. Almost half of the album is a cappella, literally - they were recorded in a church."

I wondered why she chose to start the three planned recordings with laments. "I'm not really business-minded, I suppose," she said, laughing. "They're not all laments for the dead. They're all sad songs, but within that umbrella of laments, there's quite a bit of variety; there are songs of the jilted lover, and the person who's leaving home, probably forever. Some of them are quite melodramatic, almost comically so in one or two cases; for example, in the song about two lovers parting ("Is Fada ó Bhaile a d'Aithneoin"): 'It's far from home I'd know you by your walk ... The smell of apples every morning on your kiss ... By Halloween I'll surely be dead.' Sturm und Drang stuff, if you like."

The other half of the songs on the recording she described as being 'accompanied quite sparsely'. "I wanted to set up this accompanying style that is a very linear, drone-based accompaniment rather than horizontal, chordal-based kind of thing; because I feel that the music for the most part isn't diatonic - some of it is - but a lot of the songs that I've chosen aren't; they don't suit being accompanied in that way. And so, I have stringed instruments; the viola da gamba player, Jay Elfenbein, is a great improviser in early music; he's a jazz musician and came from the jazz double bass tradition, and he, like all of the accompanists, are very intuitive."

It was the same with Robert Mealy, the fiddle player, she added, whom she has known from her time with the ensemble, Sequentia. "He picked up the fiddle idiom very well. And there's, Chris Layer, an uilleann piper and flute player par excellence, who plays on the New York scene; again, when he's playing the flute as part of this music-making, the strings, flute and voice meld terribly well. And even for a more sombre touch, Mel Mercier's playing of the bass drum adds the right funereal touch." Collectively, Caitríona and her musician friends are known as Dúlra, which means "the elements".

Caitríona has performed a lot in downtown Manhattan with - among others - the women's group, Banshee, a group of five Irish and Irish-American women. "We'd get together for special occasions like Samhain and Bealtaine in clubs downtown, some of them punk venues or rock venues! One is a poet, two are writers, one is a comedian, and another a dancer, and then myself, the singer. I would sing laments, and even with a fairly lively audience, I'd get a fair hearing. So that gave me some confidence in putting out the laments."

How has Eric adjusted to life in Ireland? "He loves Ireland, and has adjusted very well. We live in Temple Bar with all it's madness all around us. It's not all that much of a leap from New York City. His work is different; essentially, he's been a director and producer, but now he's chief executive officer of The Ark - the children's theatre in Temple Bar - with an emphasis mainly on the artistic side of things."

Before we parted, I asked Caitríona - the much travelled singer and now mother - how she saw herself at this stage of her life? "As a mother, a singer, Irish. Music is important to me, of course, but it's also part of my motherhood. I'm singing to Davy all the time. We sing to each other. Performing for an audience is part of that, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all."

But I know very well she would jump at the opportunity of performing, and I hope she does - soon. She's a talented woman, and having met her in person, and heard her on CD, I for one can't wait to see her on stage in that special production directed by her husband.