News Release

Back to Newsroom

---

01.24.06

For immediate release: Monday, December 12, 2005
Contact: Nancy Condon, 404.727.6687, nancy.condon@emory.edu

Emory Celebrates the Season with the “Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert”

This December, Emory presents a holiday concert that has become an Emory and Atlanta holiday tradition. Pagan meets St. Patrick and the Celtic world meets Appalachia at the thirteenth annual “Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert,” Dec. 17 and 18 at 8 p.m. in Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts ($25; discount category members, $20; students and children, $10). This year, Grammy Award-winning banjo virtuoso Alison Brown and “Riverdance” composer Bill Whelan join top regional performers and such notable Emory performers as the Emory Early Music Ensemble and dancers from Emory’s dance program. For tickets and information, call 404-727-5050 or go to www.arts.emory.edu.

The concert, produced by Emory's W.B. Yeats Foundation under the direction of Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities James Flannery, who is also the concert’s host, has been called by the Atlanta Journal Constitution "a rollicking yet reverend occasion.” The concert celebrates in music, dance, poetry, song and story the Christmas traditions of the Celtic lands and their connections with many similar traditions in the American South. In addition to Alison Brown and Bill Whelan, this year’s concert also features musicians and dancers representing the Highland Scots tradition of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as well as a number of the top traditional performers of the Southeast, including Irish tenor and storyteller James Flannery, the Buddy O’Reilly Band, fiddler Maggie Holtzberg, singer Barbara Panter, Welsh harper Kelly Stewart, the four-part harmony of Nonesuch, Highland pipers and dancers, Irish step dancers and Appalachian clog dancers. A concert highlight is the premiere of "Quis Est Deus" (“Who is God?”), a choral setting by Bill Whelan of a seventh-century Irish prayer-poem in which a fairy child questions St. Patrick on the meaning of the Christian God he is bringing to Ireland. "Quis Est Deus" will be performed by the Emory Early Music Ensemble under the direction of Jody Miller, with a counter-tenor solo by Khaemille Parham. The Emory Early Music Ensemble will perform three other pieces in the concert.

Arts at Emory

Emory is home to a vibrant arts community and welcomes the public to more than 200 events annually featuring guest, faculty, alumni and student artists. More than 20 exhibitions and 80 concerts are presented each year. The work of internationally-known artists is featured in exhibitions at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Schatten Gallery, and Visual Arts Building and Gallery; in performances of the Flora Glenn Candler Concert Series; in new play development through the Playwriting Center of Theater Emory and Brave New Works Series; in readings for the creative writing program reading series; and through residencies in the Emory Coca-Cola Artists-in-Residence Series. Emory is home to 14 professional and student music ensembles, including Emory Dance Company and Theater Emory. The Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, one of six performance venues on campus, opened in February 2003 and houses the Dance Studio, Theater Laboratory, and the 825-seat, state-of-the-art Cherry Logan Emerson Concert Hall. For more information on the arts at Emory, call 404-727-5050.

Mission of the Arts at Emory: Emory University provides a dynamic, innovative environment for the study, creation and presentation of the arts.

###

---

Back to top