A Celtic Voice

To Drive the Cold Winter Away; Loreena McKennitt

Today’s CD has no personal story. I heard this angel’s voice on a song called “Snow” from the first Celtic Christmas album. I must have listened to this song a hundred times before I became entranced by the singularity of this specific ballad. After looking up the name Loreena McKennitt just a few months ago, I knew that I had found a true treasure.

This beautiful artist makes her home in Stratford, Ontario. In addition to shepherding a luminous and incandescent soprano voice, she plays Celtic harp, the accordian and the piano. Some might claim to see a stylistic resemblance to Enya, but I see Ms. McKennitt as traditionally and classically grounded, using literary works as sources of lyrics lending a folkish manner to her music.

Ms. McKennitt, on this her second album, performs all of her songs in churches and great halls, specifically at The Church of Our Lady in Guelph, Ontario, Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery near Limerick, Ireland, and at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland. The sparse acoustic accompaniments that lightly coat the golden tones of Ms. McKennitt’s expressive soprano voice hover and echo in the air, touring the vast expanses of stone confined space, ledges that worship at the base of stained glass scenes and distant corners of cobble and rocky wall.

In 1998, Ms. McKennitt’s fiancé Ronald Rees, his brother Richard and one of their close friends drowned in a boating incident. From that time until 2006 in which she recorded a studio album called “An Ancient Muse”, she substantially reduced the number of public performances and artistic output. In 2007, she began performing again, visiting places in North America, Europe, and, in 2009, the Mediterranean.

Loreena McKennitt says that she wanted, as a young girl, to be a veterinarian. But then music chose her to be one of its voices. I find it interesting that sometimes a fine line separates the passion to do what we want to do and the integrity to do what we're called to do, and that at the same time a wide swath separates the vocation that we want to enjoy and the mission that we're called to accomplish.

Credits: To one who will lose their lifelong mate before the lifelong part starts, and who will emerge on the others side still bearing all the gifts that they were ready to share with their lifelong mate but are now destined to share with others.