Celtic Christmas Concert Features Dazzling Lineup

Published: December 2, 2004

Traditional musicians, singers and dancers will be featured in this year’s Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert on Saturday, Dec. 11, and Sunday, Dec. 12. The annual event will be held at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Emory University and is sponsored by Emory’s W. B. Yeats Foundation, under the direction of Dr. James Flannery.

ATLANTA—This year’s 12th annual Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert is dedicated to celebrating the life-affirming mystical nature of Celtic spirituality—a tradition that, wherever it may be found, honors in its poetic expressiveness and in its childlike acceptance of the blessedness of ordinary life, a sense of joyful renewal.

Called a “reverent yet rollicking experience” by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the concert features a variety of international, regional and Emory artists. The lineup includes traditional musicians, singers and dancers from as far away as Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Dublin, Ireland, as well as the premiere of a setting of “The Magi” by W. B. Yeats composed by Emory’s Steve Everett and performed by the Emory Dance Company with choreography by Lori Teague. 

In addition to its regular lineup of popular regional performers, the concert also features for the first time a selection of medieval carols from Brittany interpreted by the Emory Early Music Ensemble and Chorus under the direction of Jody Miller.

The concert will be held on Saturday, Dec. 11, and Sunday, Dec. 12, at 8 p.m. in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts at Emory University. The event is produced by Emory’s W. B. Yeats Foundation, under the direction of Dr. James Flannery.

Regularly chosen one of the “best bets” of the Atlanta holiday season, audiences of all ages have flocked to the Celtic Christmas Concert year after year, according to Flannery, because it is one of those rare experiences that bridges the gap between popular, folk and so-called “high” culture. Religious in its feeling without at all being “churchy,” the concert portrays in music, dance, poetry, song and story the extraordinary Christmas traditions of the Celtic lands, many of them dating back to medieval times. It also shows how many of those traditions have had a direct influence on the ways in which Southerners continue to celebrate Christmas, particularly in the old time music and dance of the Appalachian region.

The concert reflects Yeats’ vision of Celtic culture having a “basis in realism and an apex in beauty,” Flannery said. According to Flannery, Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Emory, the key to the contemporary global interest in the culture of the Celtic lands lies in its profoundly spiritual nature.

“For St. Patrick, it was a relatively easy task to convert the native Irish to Christianity in the fifth century.  That is because the Celts, from their own Druidic traditions, already understood that the world was holy—all the world, not just parts. And that sense of holiness was—and is—reflected as much in the rousing jigs and reels of toe-tapping dance music as in the marvelous prayer poems developed in the monasteries of Ireland, Scotland and Wales with their celebration of the wonder of God in all the artifacts of nature—from the lyrical sweetness of bird song to the changing of the seasons to the mysterious movement of the stars and planets across the heavens,” Flannery explained. “That sense of a mystical wonder in the ordinary is still honored by families gathered in their homes every Christmas to make music, to dance, to tell stories and to renew their faith in God and life as symbolized by the birth of the Christ Child, ‘the light of the world,’ coming at the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year.”

The Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert has become a communal, almost family, gathering for many people. That is also true for performers like harper Kelly Stewart, Irish step dancers Katie Baughman and Erin Connelly, and Scottish Highland dancer Bronwen Halstead-Nussloch, whom audiences have watched grow up on the performance stage. Other returning Celtic Christmas favorites include Nonesuch, a group of Georgia folk musicians who perform old-time Southern gospel songs in close harmony, the versatile talents of John Maschinot and the Buddy O’Reilly Band, featuring singer Lisa Edwards, and Irish tenor Flannery, renowned as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Irish song and folklore.

Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, was settled by immigrants from the Scottish Highlands driven from their homes by the infamous Clearances of the early 18th century. Three centuries later, the fiddle and dance traditions of the Highlands are kept alive in Cape Breton, one of the most pristine and wildly beautiful areas of North America. In Ireland as in Cape Breton and other parts of the far-flung Celtic community, folk traditions are directly passed on, parents to children, among families gathered around the hearth. Barcó, a brilliant Irish musical ensemble consisting of three talented brothers—harper and singer Cormac, flute and tin whistle virtuoso Eamonn and guitarist, keyboard player and arranger Fionán—are contemporary representatives of a family known as one of the chief exponents of the historic Gaelic culture of Ireland.

In France, the Ensemble Choral du Bout du Monde under the direction of Christian Desbordes, has achieved an international reputation for recovering the rich musical heritage of the Celts in Brittany. Their recording, “Noels,” has received critical acclaim by exposing modern listeners to the starkly primal beauty of Christmas carols preserved in Brittany for centuries.

All of these traditions are represented in the 2004 Atlanta Celtic Christmas program—a living testimony to the continuity and distinctive qualities of the Celtic culture. At Emory, which has just launched an Irish Studies program and boasts of a world-class collection of Irish manuscripts as well as the Bobby Jones exchange program with St. Andrews University, Scotland, there has also been a long commitment to honoring the distinctive Celtic heritage of the American South. The participation in this year’s concert of the Emory Early Music Ensemble and Chorus and the Emory Dance Company is an outgrowth of these commitments

It is also fitting that this year’s concert will feature Everett’s setting of “The Magi,” an apocalyptic poem on the enduring power of the Christmas message by Yeats. Treating the wise men as emblematic of all who have sought spiritual renewal at Christmastime down through the ages, in “The Magi” Yeats boldly addresses human dissatisfaction with “Calvary’s turbulence” and a Christian God concerned primarily with suffering and the redemption of sin. Honoring his Celtic heritage, Yeats invites readers to dwell upon the message derived from the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” of Bethlehem, namely the possibility for full incarnation of the heavenly kingdom on earth. Imminent and phenomenal rather than remote and transcendent, the God honored by Yeats is one of grace, revelation and a joyful celebration of life.

Tickets are $20 for adults, $16 for discount groups and $8 for students and children. The concert has reserved seating. Call the box office at (404) 727-5050. The Schwartz Center at Emory is located at 1700 N. Decatur Road, Atlanta.