This ChoralMarch series probably wouldn’t exist were it not for Desmond Earley and the UCD Choral Scholars. A few years back they released a CD of choral works from Ireland and Scotland, and while Mó Ghile Mhear is an Irish song it is about that quintessentially Scots theme, Bonnie Prince Charlie.
I am mulling over a whole month of Jacobite (and anti-Jacobite) music. An astonishing amount of Scottish (and not only Scottish) folk music is based on the ultimate political lost cause. For the moment, here is UCD’s finest (and I don’t use that superlative lightly – if I was asked in some hypothetical apocalyptic situation to save one thing about UCD, it would be the Choral Scholars) with a stirring setting of another Jacobite song of defiant, loving failure.
Séamus Sweeney 