By Sean Smith, BostonIrish Contributor
December 28, 2020
Sean Smith, BostonIrish Contributor
While its focus tends to be on traditional and contemporary Scottish music, the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow also features music from Ireland and other countries.
With live music – as we know it, anyway – in stasis these past several months, many venues, organizations, and artists have turned to virtual formats for presenting performances, whether through livestreaming or pre-recorded concerts. That includes Irish/Celtic music, as witnessed by GBH’s 2020 “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” and the annual BCMFest, which will take place January 14-18 [see story elsewhere on the Boston Irish site].
The tumultuous upside-down, inside-out year of 2020 is finally grinding to a conclusion. Happily, it’s going to end with a much-loved tradition still intact, albeit in a slightly different form. “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn,” the holiday-themed variety show created and hosted by Brian O’Donovan, and usually presented live from multiple locations each year, is retitled as “A Virtual Christmas Celtic Sojourn” this time around.
The 2020 show will be pre-recorded, featuring O’Donovan hosting, telling a story or two, maybe reciting a poem, along with his Christmas Celtic Ensemble and a roster of guests, some, through technical wizardry, performing from other countries. It will be streamed, Dec. 15-20, with the show emanating from the stage of the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, and will have separate intros from O’Donovan each night, suggesting that the performance is coming from the usual different venues.
By Sean Smith, Special to the Reporter
December 10, 2020
Sean Smith, Special to the Reporter
Jenna Moynihan, left, and Maura Shawn Scanlin, with Owen Marshall (foreground), during preparations for “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.”
Creative minds, talent, technology triumph over space and time
Right from the beginning, the idea behind “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” was to make audiences feel as if they were enjoying the Celtic-flavored celebration of the holiday season in the comfort of their own home – even if they were sitting inside a theater, such as the Cutler Majestic in Boston.
This year, audiences can literally stay at home and see the show, from Dec. 15-20, as if it were in a theatrical setting. Like so many other live events of the past several months, the annual offering of music, dance, and storytelling from Irish, Scottish, and other Celtic, and occasionally non-Celtic, traditions has switched to a virtual format for this year. But thanks to a whole lot of pla