Holiday season special for globe-trotting Irish Tenors

Irish Tenors (from left) Finbar Wright, Anthony Kearns and Ronan Tynan perform Saturday at the Orpheum.

On Christmas Eve, two days after he's scheduled to wrap up his current tour with the acclaimed Irish Tenors, Finbar Wright will be on a jet plane headed across the Atlantic, racing back to spend the holiday in his native County Cork with his family.

"I'm always home for Christmas," says Wright. "My family has grown up with it. I think they kind of expect me to be away for a period of time, months at a time. It's part of life for them. It's quite possible we'll be passing Santa in the sky. We'll try to avoid him if we can."

Wright has spent at least a portion of every holiday season away from home on the Irish Tenors' annual Christmas tour since joining the group in 2000. He had initially been approached two years earlier when television producers first started putting together a Celtic-themed group modeled on the phenomenally successful Three Tenors project starring opera singers Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo.

Wright was a natural first call. A former priest who started his singing career at the ripe age of 32, the classically trained vocalist was already a well-loved performer in Celtic music circles with three television specials, a handful of gold and platinum-selling records and high-profile gigs to his credit, such as performing at a state dinner for President Bill Clinton.

Wright's recording contract at the time precluded his participating in the tenors' first project, the 1999 PBS special "Live In Dublin." But when John McDermott bowed out a year later, Wright at last was free to step in.

Since then Wright and his fellow tenors -- which currently include founding members Anthony Kearns, the Irish Music Association's 2010 Best Irish Tenor; Ronan Tynan, a favorite singer of President George W. Bush's -- have made three more television specials and recorded six more best-selling albums.

A standout for all three tenors was the group's 2001 Ellis Island project. The concert, hosted by actor Martin Sheen and available on CD and DVD, featured the trio performing in the former immigrant inspection station in New York (currently a museum) where millions of people, including many from Ireland, first entered the United States between 1892 and 1954.

"That was a huge privilege given the history of Irish people and the immigrant history of the Irish people in the United States," says Wright.

The tenors' most recent CD returns them to more familiar turf. Released last year, Christmas is the group's second Yuletide-themed recording, following 2003's We Three Kings. (In 2005, they released Sacred, a collection of expressly religious, though not specifically Christmas-related, music.) The disc, with versions of "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Fairytale of New York" by Irish punk band the Pogues, was intended, like the current live show, to be a varied and fun take on the holiday.

"This is the most enjoyable time of the year for us because of the mixture of repertoire," says Wright. "We do the classical songs like 'O Holy Night.' And there's the fun songs like 'Santa Claus is Coming To Town.'

"And then we do a lot of the Irish music as well, of course. ... We have great fun. That's the important ingredient."

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The Irish Tenors

8 p.m. Saturday at the Orpheum, 203 S. Main. Tickets: $29 and $75, plus fees. Tickets available at the box office, by phone at (901) 525-3000, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood, and through Ticketmaster. For more information, visit orpheum-memphis.com.

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