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The concert brings together nine leading Celtic traditional musicians for a program of carols, dance tunes and slow airs in an auditorium glowing with candlelight.The company is led by music director Keith Murphy, who for over a dozen years was music director of GBH’s A St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn and has been a featured performer with the Boston Revels Midwinter productions. A native of Newfoundland, Murphy is a singer and guitarist with four solo recordings to his name; he founded the Northern Roots Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont, twenty years ago and remains its artistic director.
He is joined by uilleann piper Joey Abarta, who in 2014 became the first American piper to take first prize at An tOireachtas since 1969 and who this year received an Artist Fellowship in the Traditional Arts from the Massachusetts Cultural Council; concertina player and singer Brenda Castles of County Meath, a two-album solo artist and recipient of the 2025 Brian O’Donovan Award; the Boston quartet Forsyth - Kate Knudsvig, Erin Shea Hogan, Kat Wallace and Helen Kuhar - who have performed at the Maine Celtic Celebration and the Baltimore Old-Time Festival and whose debut album will be released in early January; and The Murphy Beds, the duo of Eamon O’Leary and
Jefferson Hamer, who have performed at the Kennedy Center; Hamer’s Child Ballads collaboration with Anaïs Mitchell won a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award.
The program draws on the Irish, Scottish and English Christmas and winter traditions, from carols sung for four centuries to unaccompanied slow airs on the uilleann pipes and full-company dance tune sets.
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Event venue
50 E Merrimack St, Lowell, MA, United States, Massachusetts 01852
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