Known as Ireland’s leading collegiate chamber choir, the UCD Chamber Scholars have created a video for their rendition of Brendan Graham‘s ‘Orphan Girl’. And we were thrilled to have been one of the locations to feature in the video – chosen along with Old Head beach, Doolough Valley and Louisburgh.
It is a beautiful, haunting song and the video so perfectly conveys the emotion behind it. Orphan Girl was written by Brendan Graham for a the Annual Great Famine Commemoration ceremony held in 2012 at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks to commemorate the relocation of over four thousand female orphans who, between 1848 and 1850, were brought from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s.
The work was first performed by the Australian Girls’ Choir and Sarah Calderwood at the 2012 ceremony. It is reliably estimated that today, up to two million Australians are descended from the original 4,112 Irish Orphan Girls, who found a new life in Australia in the years of Ireland’s Great Calamity.
The rendition of the work is available on a compilation album they feature on titled ‘Invisible Stars’, an enchanting collection of traditional and contemporary choral music from Ireland and Scotland and features arrangements and compositions by some of Ireland’s most celebrated composers. This arrangement for upper voices and guitar is by Desmond Earley. The album can be purchased here.
Brendan Graham is one of Ireland’s most successful songwriters, having written two winning Eurovison entries for Ireland (Rock N Roll Kids and The Voice) as well as one of the most successful songs in the history of popular music, You Raise Me Up, which to date has been recorded over hundreds of times in numerous languages.
Article re-printed courtesy of IMRO.
If you or anyone you know is looking for a stunning location in which to shoot, please keep us in mind. With a stunning historic house and heritage buildings, hundreds of acres of lake land and woodland and a willing team, we would love to discuss your needs. Contact Biddy on +3539856117 or marketing (at) westporthouse.ie.