Allison Crowe Brings “Tidings” to Whistler Holiday Experience December 23, 2011

Home is where the hearth is this year for all ages of music lovers, and families looking for a very special way to celebrate the season in song. Expect plenty of rocking holiday cheer, laced with overtones of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles and more when musician Allison Crowe brings “Tidings” to the Whistler Conference Centre, (4010 Whistler Way), on Friday, December 23 at 7:00 pm.

Allison Crowe’s performed as concert headliner on hundreds of occasions, in a dozen countries – from solo gigs in jazz caverns and grand churches, to the concert festival stage alongside the Queen’s Master of Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and Britain’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

The internationally-acclaimed vocalist/pianist, born and raised on Canada’s west coast, tours Europe regularly from her base in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She’s delighted to return to the mountain and join in the growing tradition that is The Whistler Holiday Experience. Adding to the fun mix of games, activities and pastimes for locals and visitors alike to enjoy at this family-friendly celebration is Crowe’s “Tidings” concert which happens on the Whistler Conference Centre’s Grand Foyer stage.

This unique setting, aglow from the room’s 40 foot-high river-rock-formed Rumford fireplace, makes for the coziest community living-room concert of the holiday season.

Tidings stirs together traditional Christmas carols and holiday favourites with an organic blend of rock, jazz, folk, gospel and soul. "Be prepared to be amazed," chimes ChristmasReviews.com Longtime NPR broadcaster Ross Hocker calls Allison Crowe's show, "The most honest, heartfelt, and directly intimate concert in my entire life."

Italian radio calls Allison Crowe “Una voce incredibile per una forza della natura."

Crowe is akin, in ways, to the late, great, Swedish power-house soprano, Birgit Nilsson, about whom it’s said “No record or CD could quite prepare a listener for the real thing, live in the opera house”.

Tidings is Allison Crowe's melding of the sacred and secular in “songs of the season” and spirit. Some of the music is familiar repertoire, delivered in singular style. Some is not like anything customarily heard in a holiday-time concert.

Tidings viscerally surveys a musical terrain of carols - It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, In the Bleak Midwinter, What Child Is This, First Noel, Silent Night, O Holy Night - performed with rare artistry and passion, and emotive arrangements, alongside the modern canon of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Lennon/McCartney+, and Allison Crowe’s original songs, (including the just-composed “Arthur”, and the elegiac “Northern Lights” and “Dearly”), that draw on themes of faith, hope, sorrow, joy, redemption, transcendence and more from life’s well.

Since its first staging in 2003, Tidings has evolved into a singular concert experience, known and loved ’round the world, and, this holiday season, Allison Crowe brings it on home to you – a gift from the Whistler Holiday Experience.