Call in your reservations for our October 5 show with Jenna Moynihan & Màiri Chaimbeul and Torrin Ryan to 401-725-9272.
Blazing a freshly virtuosic trail along Celtic music’s historical transatlantic pathways, U.S. fiddler Jenna Moynihan and Skye harpist Màiri Chaimbeul, both Berklee College graduates and accomplished composers, combine their passion for Scottish and Gaelic tradition with U.S., Irish, Breton and Swedish influences. At once raw and refined, deeply rooted and sparklingly new, their interplay teems with ideas, excitement and creative chemistry. They have performed at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Scots Fiddle Fest in Edinburgh, Brian O’Donovan’s St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn, and in France. Their debut album, One Two was released in 2017.
Call in your reservations for our October 19 show with The Winifred Horan Trio to 401-725-9272.
The extraordinary Irish fiddler Winifred Horan brings her new trio to Blackstone River Theatre for a lively evening of Celtic music with Dan Faiella on guitar and Utsav Lal on piano. Horan was born in New York City to Irish parents and studied piano and Irish fiddle playing at a young age. She attended the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied classical violin. She has played with multiple orchestras, including the Boston Pops Orchestra, before joining the all-female Celtic music ensemble Cherish the Ladies in 1990. Winifred is best known as co-founder of the Irish super group Solas. Outside of her work with Solas, she is a nine-time champion Irish stepdancer and an All-Ireland fiddle champion, having won an All-Ireland Junior Fiddle Championship at age eleven.
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Our scheduled show with TALISK has been POSTPONED to a September 2020 date to be announced soon due to the Coronavirus outbreak.
There are VERY few bands we ask back twice in a calendar year – Talisk is one of them after blowing away the audience in their Blackstone River Theatre debut in September! In just five years, the Scottish trio Talisk has stacked up several major awards for their explosively energetic yet artfully woven sound including 2017’s Folk Band of the Year both at the BBC Alba Scots Trad Music Awards and a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award. Mohsen Amini – the 2018 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ Musician of the Year, Hayley Keenan and Graeme Armstrong seamlessly meld concertina, fiddle and guitar to produce a multi-layered, enthralling signature sound that has effortlessly captivated audiences from the USA to Australia, and throughout the UK. Appearances at world-leading festivals – including the Cambridge Folk Festival, Denmark’s Tønder, WOMAD UK, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, Celtic Colours, Milwaukee Irish Festival and five successive outings at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections – have amassed a die-hard following, while the world’s folk and world music media have also lauded high credits upon the trio. The release of their hotly anticipated second album, “Beyond,” in Oct. 2018 was met with a five-star ‘Top of the World’ review in “Songlines,” praising the band as “incredibly infectious and endearing… fresh, invigorating, accomplished and playfully frisky.” If you saw them last time, you’ll be back … if you missed them, here’s your chance!
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Call in your reservations for our September 28 show with Peter Janson and Hiroya Tsukamoto to 401-725-9272. And don’t miss their guitar workshop from 4-6 p.m. Details below!
Peter Janson is an acclaimed award-winning contemporary solo guitarist, touring and recording artist with performances at Carnegie Hall Weill Recital Hall, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Healdsburg Guitar Festival, the WUMB Music Festival in Boston, and many other festivals and venues throughout North America. He has had three solo albums in the Top Five of the NAR radio charts and his recordings have over 1.3-million BMI verified broadcasts across all media. In performance, Peter prefers a repertoire that offers variety rather than concentrating on one specific style, and he presents contemporary solo guitar music that reveals his interest in weaving common elements of Jazz, Folk/Traditional, Celtic, European, and improvisational music.
Hiroya Tsukamoto is a one-of-a-kind composer, guitarist and singer-songwriter from Kyoto, Japan. In 2000, Hiroya received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music and came to the United States. He formed his own group in Boston, “INTEROCEANICO” which consists of unique musicians from different continents including Latin Grammy Colombian singer Marta Gomez. Hiroya has also released two solo albums, “Heartland” and “Places.” Hiroya has been leading concerts internationally including several appearances at Blue Note in New York City with his group. Hiroya has performed, recorded and shared the stage with Esperanza Spalding, The Kennedys, Brooks Williams and Jim Kweskin.
Peter and Hiroya will also offer an acoustic guitar workshop for advanced beginner and intermediate guitarists from 4-6:00 p.m. Enjoy a relaxed learning experience as two of the nation’s best acoustic guitarists share their vast knowledge of topics and techniques for steel-string guitar in a two-hour workshop. Cost is $30 … or $40 for both the workshop and evening concert. Maximum 12 students. Finger style and flat-pickers are welcome. Tab reading or standard notation reading is helpful but not necessary. Register by emailing [email protected]
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Call in your reservations for our September 21 show with Cory Pesaturo & Jonathan Cannon to 401-725-9272.
Three-time world accordion champion and Cumberland, R.I. native Cory Pesaturo is at the forefront of the accordion world, pushing the boundaries of what is possible on the accordion. Pesaturo is the only person to ever win a World Championship on Acoustic, Digital and Jazz Accordion, and the only accordion graduate of the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass. In 2017, Cory became a Guinness World Record Holder, as RedBull® flew him to Austria to break the Marathon Accordion Record, in which he played for over 32 hours. Cory’s main contribution is his visionary thinking of how the accordion should be used, played, taught, and presented in modern music. This vision led him to give two TED talks, develop his own electric accordion, and make the first ever skinned accordion which includes a symmetric lighting system attached to the keys. Cory returns with Jonathan Cannon who performs regularly on violin, sometimes as a member of award-winning Boston klezmer band Ezekiel’s Wheels. He also serves as program chair of the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA). Cory will also feature special guests Giulia Haible and Caroline Dressler on cello and fiddle!
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Call in your reservations for our September 22 show with Väsen to 401-725-9272.
The musicians of Väsen take the traditional music of their native Sweden and blend it into a mixture of distinctive rhythms, gorgeous melodies, and unstoppable grooves. Mikail Marin plays viola, Roger Tallroth plays 12-string guitar, and Olov Johansson plays nykelharpa – a bowed, 16-string instrument related to both the hurdy-gurdy and the fiddle and unique to Sweden. In 1990, Olov became world champion of both the modern chromatic and older historical nyckelharpas at the first-ever Nyckelharpa World Championships at Österbybruk, Sweden. The trio has been performing and recording together ever since. On their return to Blackstone River Theatre they will be celebrating their 30th anniversary!
Väsen is a band people both critics and audiences rave about – mere praise doesn’t seem to be enough. According to the Utne Reader, the band “treads an enchanted territory between classical, folk, and pop.” National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” put it this way: “The absurdly broad term world music is rendered useless in the face of these musicians who play with such genuine passion and glee that everything on the globe seems to disappear except their hometown fires. This is local music in the best sense of the term – believable, human-scaled, and fluent in the international language of musical interplay.” The word väsen has several meanings – spirit, essence, noise. This talented Swedish trio conveys the essence of Swedish traditional music with a joyful noise that is very likely to raise your spirits!
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Call in your reservations for our May 4 show with Joyce Katzberg to 401-725-9272.
On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Pete Seeger’s birth, BRT presents Rhode Island’s own topical songstress and cultural organizer, Joyce Katzberg in a celebration of the songs and social activism that made Seeger a permanent fixture in the history of folk music. As might be expected, there will be plenty of opportunity for audience participation. In the first set, performing 3 songs each, will be Partington & Sweeney, Jimmy Warren, and Bob Drouin. Joyce will then do a solo second set. Seeger and Katzberg first met in person in 1989 and went on to perform together several times in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and New York. Katzberg is a co-founder of the former R.I. Labor and Ethnic Heritage Festival and Stone Soup Coffeehouse and credits Seeger as being the inspiration behind both. Mary Lee Partington has praised Joyce as “the First Lady of Rhode Island Folk” and goes on to describe her as having “a voice filled with her passion for social justice and her passion for life. With a vocal range as wide as it is deep, her singing style has a sultry substance – at times silky, at times smoky, always strong and vibrant. In a well-traveled career, she has sung beside Pete Seeger and an American grand choir of leading artists who have devoted their work to the cause of social justice, human rights, and our responsibility to care for one and all. If her voice has heart, it is because she has been at the heart of folk music in America while placing the truths she holds dear, in the spotlight.” After more than a half a century on the professional stage, Katzberg plans to retire from performing in November, 2019. Partial concert proceeds will benefit Seeger’s environmental organization, The Clearwater Fund. Please Note: Audience members are requested to be as fragrance-free as possible.
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Purchase tickets online or call in your reservations for our May 18 show with Karan Casey to 401-725-9272.
Karan Casey has long been one of the most innovative, provocative and imitated voices in Irish traditional and folk music. Her career has spanned 25 years from the early days as a jazz performer in Dublin to her heady days in New York with the band Solas to her now established solo career and she has sold over half a million albums. Since Solas, Casey has carved out a unique place in contemporary Irish and folk music. She has recorded seven solo albums, has won Best Irish Female Vocalist twice, Best Irish Folk album and a Grammy for her collaboration with Paul Winter. Casey has also been nominated for the BBC Folk Awards and has performed with Peggy Seeger, Liam Clancy, James Taylor, and Tim O’Brien. The Boston Globe says, “Casey’s voice is among the loveliest in folk music and she’s a wonderful interpreter of both contemporary and traditional material.” “Hieroglyphs That Tell the Tale” is the evocative title of the new album from Karan Casey, which sees her return to a mix of traditional and folk song imbued with a modern twist, sitting alongside some new self-penned songs. Casey has also recently spearheaded a campaign – #FairPlé (“Fair Play”) – to promote gender balance in the production, performance, promotion, and development of Irish traditional and folk music. Many performers – male as well as female, in Ireland and elsewhere, have strongly voiced their support for her endeavor to bring this important issue to the forefront. As for performing, for Karan, the criteria has always been, “Is it a good song? I’m always looking for stories that are sung well and delivered with meaning, and that’s what’s most important.” Karan will be joined by Matt Heaton and Sheila Falls Keohane for tonight’s concert.
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Purchase tickets online or call in your reservations for our May 19 show with Darlingside to 401-725-9272.
Darlingside delivers a truly moving blend of subtlety, power, outstanding vocal quality and contemporary songwriting. The Boston-based quartet features four distinct voices clustered around a single microphone; their tightly-arranged tunes drawing from the unexpected, including strains of bluegrass, classical, and even barbershop. Accompanied by an arsenal of classical strings, guitars, mandolin, and percussion, these four close friends swap instruments from song to song and offer a sound that defies standard genre classifications. While the band’s critically acclaimed 2015 release “Birds Say” was steeped in nostalgia and the conviction of youth, their new album “Extralife” grapples with dystopian realities and uncertain futures. Whether ambling down a sidewalk during the apocalypse or getting stuck in a video game for eternity, the band asks, sometimes cynically, sometimes playfully: what comes next? Hope arrives in the form of Darlingside’s signature superpower harmonies, drawing frequent comparisons to late-60s era groups like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Byrds. And yet, their penchant for science fiction and speculative futurism counteracts any urge to pigeonhole their aesthetic as “retro.” The four close friends construct every piece of their music collaboratively, pooling musical and lyrical ideas so that each song bears the imprint of four different writing voices. NPR Music dubs the result “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop” and calls Extralife “perfectly crafted.” With a sound nodding to the music of their parents’ generation, Darlingside has established a sound that is all their own.
*All ticket prices include a $1.00 per ticket restoration charge
Call in your reservations for our February 24 show with L’Esperance Mandolin Ensemble to 401-725-9272.
Rhode Island’s L’Esperance Mandolin Ensemble is proud to announce the release of their new CD, Uisge Beatha – “Water of Life,” featuring tunes from Celtic and British folk traditions. For centuries composers have incorporated folk tunes into their own music. Byrd and Beethoven, Vivaldi and Dvorak, Grieg and Grainger, and contemporary composers like Steven Antonelli, Michael Mayerfeld Bell, and Jim Dalton, who appear on this CD, have all drawn from traditional melodies for inspiration for their music. With “Water of Life,” L’Esperance Mandolin Ensemble celebrates that intersection between traditional and classical music. As lovers of both the energy and passion of traditional music and the rich harmonic and rhythmic potential of classical music, L’Esperance showcases music from folk revivals going back hundreds of years and into the present. L’Esperance features almost 30 musicians of different backgrounds and ages from the Cape Cod area, Rhode Island and Connecticut, who come together to enjoy the pleasure of making music with each other. Since 1994, L’Esperance has been sharing that joy with audiences around New England. Director of L’Esperance Mandolin Ensemble, Joshua Bell, was named the Concertmaster of the Providence Mandolin Orchestra in 1979. He has played with the North American Mandolin Ensemble, The American Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra, the Classical Mandolin Society of America.