Secret Garden

The Irish/Norwegian pair Secret Garden first attracted widespread notice in the mid-1990s with their richly textured, predominantly instrumental sound built around violin and keyboards. Their music blended Celtic and Norwegian folk traditions with pop and new age touches, winning them a devoted global audience drawn to its understated emotional resonance. The two musicians initially joined forces to compose and record “Nocturne,” the piece chosen to represent Norway in the Eurovision Song Contest. Although they later explored vocal-led material on 2007’s Inside I’m Singing, stripped-down duets on 2013’s Just the Two of Us, and a concert recording on 2016’s Live at Kilden, the bulk of their catalog remained faithful to the atmospheric instrumental style that continues to move listeners worldwide.

Fionnuala Sherry, the duo’s violinist and vocalist, was born in 1962 in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland. She took up the violin at age eight, moved to Dublin at fifteen for advanced studies, and graduated with honors from Trinity College’s College of Music. For a decade she performed with the RTE Concert Orchestra and collaborated with artists ranging from Van Morrison and the Chieftains to Sinead O’Connor and Chris de Burgh. In 1994 she met Norwegian keyboardist and composer Rolf Løvland, who was born in 1955 in Kristiansand. Løvland had begun writing music at nine, started his first band the same year, and later trained at Kristiansand’s Music Conservatory and Oslo’s Norwegian Institute of Music. By the time he partnered with Sherry he had already placed more than sixty compositions at the top of Norwegian radio charts; one of them, the 1985 Eurovision winner “La det swinge,” marked Norway’s first victory in the contest, and he hoped to repeat that achievement with Sherry.

Calling themselves Secret Garden, the pair’s earliest collaboration was the spare yet evocative “Nocturne,” featuring a brief vocal passage from Sherry. Selected as Norway’s 1995 Eurovision entry, the song secured Løvland and his country a second international triumph. Their debut album, Songs from a Secret Garden, appeared the following year, topping Norwegian charts and lingering two years on the U.S. New Age chart, where it reached number five. Barbra Streisand later adapted the track “Heartstrings,” adding lyrics by Ann Hampton Callaway and retitling it “I’ve Dreamed of You” for her 1999 album A Love Like Ours; she also performed it at her wedding to James Brolin. The follow-up, 1997’s White Stones, repeated the commercial success, prompting the 2000 U.K. compilation Dreamcatcher: The Best of Secret Garden (issued in the U.S. in 2001). Their fifth studio set, 2002’s Once in a Red Moon, introduced “You Raise Me Up,” a song subsequently covered by more than one hundred artists including Josh Groban, Westlife, Celtic Woman, and Il Divo. Touring across Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Japan, South Korea, and China further expanded their reach.

Inside I’m Singing, released in 2007, marked a departure by featuring thirteen fully vocal tracks with guest singers Brian Kennedy, Elaine Paige, Tracey Campbell, and Niamh Kavanagh. Sherry issued her debut solo project, Songs from Before, in 2010. The 2011 album Winter Poem returned largely to instrumental territory while including three vocal selections, and 2013’s Just the Two of Us offered fresh arrangements of earlier favorites. In 2015 the duo co-wrote the memoir You Raise Me Up: The Story of Secret Garden, and the following year they celebrated their twentieth anniversary with the concert recording Live at Kilden. Their tenth studio album, Storyteller, arrived in 2019, capturing sessions from Norway, Ireland, London, and Prague, where they performed with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra; several tracks drew from Løvland’s music for a stage work inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1861 poem Terje Vigen.