Sunday, October 29, 2017 @ 3:00pm

in Westminster United Church

 

“Kyrie’s direct yet otherworldly style seems like folk music from some isolated mountain or urban canyon. It will take you places you’ve never been.” – Robert Everett Green, The Globe & Mail

Kyrie Kristmanson is a Canadian singer/songwriter, trumpet player, guitarist and scholar of medieval music. Classically trained, Kyrie began composing at a young age and toured the Canadian Folk Festival circuit as a teenager. Public and college radio stations widely promoted her first two self-released albums and this earned her the Best Young Performer’s Award at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2008 and the Colleen Peterson Award for song writing in 2009. The same year, Emily Loizeau, a celebrated French pop star, invited her to open for her Pays Sauvage tour in France. While on tour, the renowned label NØ FØRMAT! offered Kyrie a recording contract and she relocated to Paris for the release of her Origin of Stars album in 2010.

For the subsequent tour, Kyrie performed in France, Germany, Austria, England and Japan and, following this, she enrolled at La Sorbonne to study the medieval trobaïritz, the first women composers known to history. In 2013, she defended her master’s thesis dedicated to the reconstruction of their lost songs. A recording contract with the French label Naïve came next, for which she authored a song cycle inspired by the medieval repertoire.

Fascinated by Canadian composer Patrick Carrabré’s classical arrangements of her songs for Origin of Stars, Kyrie recorded the new album with a string quartet. With arranger Clément Ducol, she recorded the work with the internationally acclaimed Voce Quartet at the Noirlac Abbey. Modern Ruin, released in 2015, was met with universal acclaim as being the most “audacious and unusual contribution to the independent music scene of the year”. She has been on tour with various quartets in Europe ever since while preparing her next album set to be released in 2018.

www.kyriekristmanson.com 

Warhol Dervish

Founded in 2007, the Montreal-based Warhol Dervish is an unorthodox chamber music collective, gathering together some of the most interesting and creative musicians in Canada. Pioneers and visionaries, Warhol Dervish is made up of early–music HIPsters, new music specialists, ardent 19th century romantics, pop collaborators, rockstar wannabes, meditators and yogis who seek to move the chamber music concert experience through the 21st century. Warhol Dervish actively seeks to blur the lines that separate classical music from other styles, to rehearse as would a band, to collaborate with improvisers, to actively seek alternative performance spaces, to collaborate with and learn from artists in other media. Upcoming concerts include shows at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Toronto Summer Music Festival, and the Lanaudière Festival. The members of Warhol Dervish draw on their professional experience working with artists and playing in ensembles as diverse as Ensemble Kore, Arion, Patrick Watson, Lhasa de Sela, Richard Reed Parry, Socalled, Suuns, Bradyworks, La La La Human Steps, Claude Lamothe, Ensemble Caprice, SMCQ, and OSM.

http://warholdervish.tumblr.com/