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Stories   >   Loreena McKennitt brings her Celtic Christmas tour to Hamilton's Music Hall / The Hamilton Spectator

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Loreena McKennitt brings her Celtic Christmas tour to Hamilton's Music Hall / The Hamilton Spectator

Posted: November 30, 2022

The Hamilton Spectator's Graham Rockingham writes….The Christmas season has always been a very special time for Loreena McKennitt. She remembers her grandfather’s sleigh, pulled by a team of horses named King and Queen, gliding through the snow on the main streets of Morden, the Manitoba town where she grew up. It was always a time of music, family and snowy delights. A time of giving.

The world-renowned Celtic harpist/singer/composer brought that seasonal spirit with her to Stratford, Ont., when she settled there in the early 1980s to work with the Stratford Festival.

As her recording career took off – McKennitt has sold more than 14 million albums, won two Juno Awards and earned two Grammy nominations – she made a point of giving back to the community.

In 2000, a 1929 Stratford school was declared redundant by the local school board. McKennitt purchased the neo-Gothic heritage building to save it from the wrecking ball. The old school is now called the Falstaff Family Centre, a community hub for young children and their parents.

Every Christmas at the centre, McKennitt would host “Cookies and Carols,” an event that became an annual family tradition in Stratford. One of its highlights was a reading by award-winning actor Cedric Smith of the Dylan Thomas classic “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

Smith’s reading of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is now the centrepiece of McKennitt’s eight-city “Under a Winter’s Moon” tour, which comes to Hamilton’s Music Hall (The New Vision United Church, 24 Main St. W.) on Friday, Dec. 9 at 7:30 p.m.

“It’s the whole second half of the concert,” McKennitt says in an interview with The Spectator. “It’s so rich. We decided to divide the story into six chapters and intersperse it with carols that in some way relate to what’s going on in the story.”

Smith has been a friend and collaborator of McKennitt since she settled in Stratford (where Smith also lives) and his voice is featured on her debut album “Elemental.”

“He and I share a great interest in the traditional English, Irish and Scottish folk music, so when I made my very first recording in 1985, I asked him to be part of that recording,” McKennitt says.

“He has not lost any ability at all. We had a rehearsal a week ago and we thought ‘holy cow.’ He is still a very powerful actor. His performance of ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ is a real gem.”

The tour coincides with McKennitt’s 16th album, also called “Under A Winter’s Moon,” released Nov. 18 on her own Quinlan Road label and Universal Music Canada. The album, recorded live last December during a series of concerts at Stratford’s historic Knox Church, features 15 seasonal songs, interspersed with readings by Smith, Indigenous actor/musician Tom Jackson and Ojibway artist Jeffrey Red George.

The tour also underscores McKennitt’s commitment to preserving heritage buildings, like the school she bought 22 years ago. She sees a need to revision the roles of such buildings, especially inner-city churches that are losing their traditional congregations. Six of the venues on the tour, including Hamilton’s New Vision United, are churches.

During the past few years, New Vision – originally built as Centenary Methodist Church in 1869 — has been gradually transforming it’s sanctuary into a 1,000-seat concert venue (the Music Hall) with the congregation meeting in a downstairs hall. The project requires an estimated $3.9 million in renovations to bring the building up to modern standards. It’s money the church doesn’t have, but there is hope.

McKennitt points to Stratford’s Knox church, where she recorded her new album, as a successful example of private business, the congregation and the community working together to save such buildings.

The tour coincides with McKennitt's 16th album, also called "Under A Winter's Moon," released Nov. 18 on her own Quinlan Road label and Universal Music Canada.

The Knox congregation recently came to an agreement with a private developer to buy the historic building, while keeping it open to the congregation for worship and to the community as a performance space.

“Knox has now been purchased by a private entity,” McKennitt says. “It’s now called Copperlight and it’s going to be involved in concerts, banquets and all kinds of things.”

General admission tickets for McKennitt’s “Under A Winter’s Moon” show are $85, plus tax and fees, available online through Eventbrite.ca. Concert goers are encouraged to wear masks during the performance.    PHOTO: TERRY MANZO/QUINLAN ROAD

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