Rhiannon Giddens has announced a UK tour for spring 2023, joined by Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. The tour starts at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, on April 27, with shows in Edinburgh, Gateshead, Perth, London, Norwich, and Birmingham, culminating at Saffron Hall in Essex on May 14.
The UK dates follow the last two concerts of Giddens' Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall in New York City in January and March and bookend the Boston premiere of Omar, her opera with Michael Abels, by the Boston Lyric Opera, May 4–7. They precede the 2023 Ojai Festival, of which she is the Music Director, in June, and a trip to Italy for sets at the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi and the Umbria Jazz Festival in July. See below for all of the currently announced dates; for all the latest and additional details, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
Rhiannon Giddens' latest album, They’re Calling Me Home, a Grammy Award winner for Best Folk Album, was recorded with Turrisi during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ireland. The two expats found themselves drawn to and comforted by the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland, which they recorded at a spare studio on a working farm outside of Dublin. The result is a twelve-song album that speaks to the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical call "home" of death.
Build a House, Rhiannon Giddens’s book debut, was published in October on Candlewick Press. The picture book was inspired by, and features the lyrics of, a song she wrote and recorded with Yo-Yo Ma to commemorate Juneteenth in 2020. A newly recorded version of “Build a House” with Ma and Turrisi was also released in October, on Nonesuch.
RHIANNON GIDDENS ON TOUR