Wednesday, July 3, 2024 – 7:30-8:30 pm
MacEwan Barn – Riverwood Conservancy
Harpist Lori Gemmell, vocalist Patricia O’Callaghan and CBC Radio host Tom Allen join forces to open our 2024 Culture at Riverwood Series with an evening of storytelling and music. Bring your lawn chairs and come celebrate a new summer series with us!
Bios
Tom Allen was born in Montreal. He worked as a bass trombonist in New York City when there were still places you just didn’t go, toured with the Great Lakes Brass and began working for the CBC on his 30th birthday, a very long time ago. He has written three books, created and hosted countless shows for theatre companies and orchestras, as well as touring a series of chamber musicals that includes The Missing Pages, Being Lost and JS Bach’s Long Walk in the Snow. He can’t imagine there’s anything else you’d like to know, but if there is you could visit his website, www.tomtomallen.com.
Lori Gemmell started as a street-corner busker in Montreal and wound up playing regularly with the Toronto Symphony, The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra and, until there wasn’t one, anymore, she was Principal Harpist with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. Lori teaches at Wilfred Laurier University and has a passion for new music. She recently (with violinist Sheila Jaffé) premiered the Partita for Violin and Harp by Caroline Lizotte. The late composer R. Murray Schafer honoured her with the gift of his Four Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Harp, which she also premiered. Lori has made four solo recordings as well as recording with songwriters Kevin Fox and Feist.
Soprano Patricia O’Callaghan is something of a wandering minstrel, with seven solo albums and many interesting collaborations along the way. A speaker of French, Spanish, and German, her early recordings focused on European cabaret, but one of Patricia’s unique talents is the ability to blend a variety of languages and musical genres seamlessly in her concerts, and to completely embody whatever style she is singing at any given moment.
“This Toronto soprano can sing a 100-year-old German tune so lustily that you almost don’t need a translation to know that someone’s about to get his throat cut or get laid or both” (National Post).
“O’Callaghan sings her diverse material as if it was always meant to go side-by-side and by the end of the evening, it’s easy to believe” (Chart Attack).
Patricia has recently become faculty at The Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University, and at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Evolution: Classical program.
Her latest album, called Dark Butterflies, with music by David Braid, and with the Prague Epoque Orchestra, has just been released.