Cover Story

Sojourning online, Brian O’Donovan and Celtic performers at your home for Christmas

RICHARD DUCKETT

For the past 17 years radio personality Brian O’Donovan, the Irish-born host of Boston radio station WGBH’s popular “A Celtic Sojourn,” has gathered some of the best Celtic singers, musicians and dancers for a touring holiday show called “WGBH presents A Christmas Celtic Sojourn with Brian O’Donovan.”

The show has been coming to The Hanover Theatre and Conservatory for the Performing Arts since 2008 and always to enthusiastic audiences.

This year, everything was going to be different if anything was going to happen at all.

O’Donovan also has a touring “St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn” show, and its March 12 date at The Hanover Theatre was canceled because of the suddenly present pandemic.

“Worcester was our first cancellation,” O’Donovan said of the March tour. Only one show would be performed, at Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport. “We got that in. That was essentially the night the world shut down,” O’Donovan said.

Looking ahead, “We thought that that was it. We knew as the summer dragged on we knew it would not be something we could commit as a live event,” he said of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.”

And yet, O’Donovan and his musician and dancer friends felt a strong pull of “Let’s do something. Let’s not not do anything,” he said.

With the connections he has made from his radio show, O’Donovan has quite an ensemble of Celtic performers for his Sojourn tours.

Scottish harpist and pianist Maeve Gilchrist, assistant music director of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn,” said, “The month simply would not be the same without the gathering of these people and the playing of this music. Early on we were just staying in touch. We all knew that we wanted to do something. There’s been so many bleak months this year.”

And so as O’Donovan put it, “We decided we are are going to try to bring some light into peoples’ homes.”

The title of this year’s tour is “WGBH Presents A Christmas Celtic Sojourn ONLINE with Brian O’Donovan.”

The “ONLINE,” of course, is new.

The show will consist of prerecorded segments that were in the process of being put together when O’Donovan spoke during a recent telephone interview. A “bubble band” ensemble, including Gilchrist, went into quarantine at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport to record music interweaved with performances by other musicians, singers and dancers, who joined in remotely from locations such as Ireland and Scotland.

“It’s a shorter show (than in-person) but everything’s a highlight,” O’Donovan said.

Cathy Jordan will be opening the show with a song from Sligo Cathedral in the West of Ireland. Singers Mairi Campbell, Siobhan Miller and Hannah Rarity will participate from Edinburgh, Scotland, while singer Eilis Kennedy connects from her her family pub in Dingle, County Kerry. O’Donovan’s daughter Aoife, who was in the show twice in the early years and is a well recognized singer-songwriter who won a Grammy this past year with her band, I’m With Her, will sing an arrangement of “I Wonder As I Wander” recorded with her husband, cellist and conductor Eric Jacobsen. Longtime “Celtic Sojourn” dancer Cara Butler will join in from Canada and several other dancers will also be featured. Besides Gilchrist, instrumentalists include musical director and multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan, Jenna Moynihan (fiddle), Owen Marshall (bouzouki, harmonium), Maura Shawn Scanlin (fiddle, vocals), Conor Hearn (guitar, vocals) and Chico Huff (bass).

The performance also includes poetry (O’Donovan can be counted on to read Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s magical memory poem “A Christmas Childhood”), storytelling and reminiscences, with O’Donovan, as usual, the genial host.

Each venue where the touring show would normally be presented has a dedicated date for when the performance will be broadcast online, and O’Donovan will

Children dance during last year’s “Celtic Sojourn.”

Scottish harpist and pianist Maeve Gilchrist, assistant music director of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn,” will perform in this year’s online event.

SUBMITTED PHOTOS

give a livestreamed introduction and talk about that particular theater. For The Hanover Theatre, showtime is 7:30 p.m. Dec. 16.

“I will be talking about Worcester, our history in Worcester, our wonderful tradition in Worcester, and the challenges for The Hanover Theatre of keeping the lights on,” O’Donovan said.

Other venues and dates are The VETS, Providence, at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 15; Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 17; Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 18; Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 19; and GBH Studios in Boston at 4 p.m. Dec. 20. “Like our regular shows, we created a live show that we take from theater to theater,” O’Donovan said.

“We asked what can we do to

partner with the theaters and replicate the experience as much as we can and in a way that supports the theater. We can’t travel, but art finds a way,” he said.

“I think this one for all of us is particularly special,” said Gilchrist.

“It really taps into the essence of Celtic music. It’s coming together to connect people. A music event that’s really focused on community and warmth and connection. I feel that in general about Celtic music that there’s something that’s intangibly powerful.”

Both O’Donovan and Gilchrist have felt that when they’ve performed in Worcester.

Behind the curtain at The Hanover Theatre before the first performance there, O’Donovan said he expected to be greeted with the usual polite appreciation he’s experienced at other locations. Then, “The curtain went up, oh my God, the energy that went up was literally stunning. In Boston they will sing along. In Worcester, they sing along from the first word of the song. Worcester is already engaging itself before we have played a note. It’s just a special place for us,” he said.

“I love coming to the theater there,” said Gilchrist. “I think there’s a community with the audience that’s unparalleled.”

Speaking of community, both O’Donovan and Gilchrist are many miles away from their original hometowns.

O’’Donovan is from Clonakilty in West Cork, Ireland, a town of about 3,000 people. He came to Boston in 1980 and was a graduate student at Emerson College, hosting a music show on its radio station WERS, and also started producing live musical events in the area. Not unrelated to his staying here, he also met his future wife. After being contacted by WGBH in 1986, O’Donovan produced and broadcast the weekly “A Celtic Sojourn.”

“A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” started out as a one-performance show at the Somerville Theatre in 2003. More recently, it toured for 15 live in-person performances in Boston, Rockport, Worcester, New Bedford and Providence.

O’Donovan has bought in Scandinavian and Canadian Martine Celtic performers, as well as the more traditional Irish and Scot-

A scene from 2019’s “Celtic Sojourn.”

tish musicians one might expect.

“The great thing about Brian O’Donovan, he’s got an incredible gift for tradition, innovation and new things to happen,” Gilchrist said.

Gilchrist was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She came to this country 17 years ago to be a student at the Berklee College of Music, where her interests were jazz and improvisation,

“But when I arrived I was surrounded by people drawing on the influence of their homeland and it made me look at my traditional music from a new lens,” she said.

“I was able to move between the two worlds.”

She now lives in Cold Spring, New York, in the country but not too far (44 miles) from New York City. Although she said playing the harp and “traditional Scottish and Irish music is at the heart of what I do,” she doesn’t feel like she’s in a box and so can “draw on many different genres.”

She has been called “a phenom-

Brian O’Donovan, the Irish-born host of Boston radio station WGBH’s popular “A Celtic Sojourn,” is the creator of “WGBH presents A Christmas Celtic Sojourn with Brian O’Donovan.”

COVER STORY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

enal harp player who can make her instrument ring with unparalleled purity.” She has played with internationally renowned orchestras, traditional Irish folk groups, and used electronic augmentation in a more contemporary, improvisatory setting.

She also knows Worcester from being a member of the Silk Road Ensemble world music group, who have been artists in residence at the College of the Holy Cross.

The stunning title track of her latest album, “The Harpweaver,” includes a recording of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay reading from her poem “The Ballad of the Harpweaver.”

Gilchrist said she met O’Donovan not long after moving here, and first got involved with the “St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn” and then the “Christmas Celtic Sojourn.”

“She is just terrific,” O’Donovan said. “She’s a big part of what we do.”

Asked if he felt satisfied with the way the show was shaping up this year, O’Donovan said, “I do, I really do …

“I’m known for my activism around live music. It’s not a Broadway show. We’re GBH after all. But we regard this as almost a public trust.”

As for an in-person “A St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn” in 2021, O’Donovan said, “We’re kind of holding out hope. We’ll be ready when we we get that indication. We believe that live music is as essential as air and food, and it’s our responsibility to bring it back into the lives of our community.”

“I don’t think it’s just going to a concert,” said Gilchrist about

Dancers perform in 2019’s “Celtic Sojourn.”

HARVEY

The scent of 2020 is in the air

JANICE HARVEY

Ah! There’s a whiff of evergreen in the air! Wonderful aromas of gingerbread and sugar cookies fill the kitchen; even the Glade Plug-In is pine-scented! And mingling with the familiar seasonal bouquets is a new scent, brought to us by the year 2020: Cynicism!

Yes, Cynicism. Can’t you smell it? (Careful! Loss of olfactory senses is a symptom of youknow-what!) Compared to other fragrances, it’s a tad dank. It’s filled our heads like a reverse Dr. Seuss story, making our hearts just a little smaller and harder while we sniffle behind our masks.

Maybe I’ve never been Susie Sunshine but I’ve tried. I first realized that my well of optimism had run dry when I started writing “Let’s get together when the plague subsides!” in my Christmas cards. I wonder what happened to “Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!”

The euphoria and relief many of us experienced on Nov. 3 is being squeezed out slowly as the “election that was/wasn’t” drags on. As COVID infection numbers go up and up, as the number of deaths from COVID numbers climbs it becomes more difficult to turn that frown upside down. It ain’t easy bein’ Shirley Temple, especially when the Good Ship Lollipop has been rechristened “The Titanic.”

Online shopping and the merchandise hawked there reflects our cynicism. Christmas ornaments that say “2020 Stink! Stank! Stunk!” pop up between the ads for crystal reindeer earrings and Ruth Bader Ginsburg paperweights. Available for a limited time only: a red and green dumpster ornament with orange flames shooting from it, embossed with the year “2020.”

I’m going to skip purchasing reminders of the worst calamity to hit the country since 9-11. Decorating with one of these items would be tantamount to hanging on my tree a tiny replica of the Twin Towers aflame, or a set of glass balls with the faces of famous assassins. Just what I need: Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth grinning over the Legos.

I’m hoping the just-aroundthe -corner (if you’re in the right demographic) COVID vaccine includes a mood lifter. As far as I can tell the makers of Prozac are the only winners in this war. Experts are warning that we mustn’t put all of our eggs, hopes and dreams into a basket labeled 2021; it’s more likely than not that the first half of next year will continue to suck greasy lemons. It’s been said that Donald Trump’s insistence that the system is rigged is a ploy to shake our confidence in voting, to make us forever doubt the integrity of poll workers and state officials. If so, like most of his plans, this one is backfiring like my dad after Saturday night beans and franks. With every recount, it becomes obvious that our most treasured right continues to be protected by honest citizens.

And so we wait. We wait for the electoral college to put an end to Trump’s insistence that he won four more years to complete the destruction of democracy. We wait for the magic elixir that will make mingling with other humans safe. For now, it feels like we’re stuck in a scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” before Clarence intervenes. What we need is a Clarence.

Maybe Yankee Candle will offer a candle that smells like hope. Then we can put the powerful scent of “Cynicism” back on the shelf where it belongs, with the candles labeled “Pessimism, “Corruption” and “Mendacity.”

I think it would be a big seller this holiday season.

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