Rhiannon Giddens is not quite a household name, though it’s likely you’ve encountered her before.
Opera fans know her as the host of the popular podcast Aria Code, in which she brings together an eclectic mix of singers, music professionals, and other experts (including more than a few relationship coaches!) to discuss the greatest arias in the repertoire. Soap opera aficionados will have caught her multi-season arc on TV’s Nashville, while gamers will recognise her major contributions to the soundtrack for Rockstar’s critically acclaimed Red Dead Redemption 2. In 2023, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar.
A polymath of the first order, Giddens is best known as a folk musician – one of the world’s greatest – with two Grammy wins and nine more nominations to her name, across the Folk, Americana, and American Roots categories. A singer-songwriter, she plays the fiddle, violin, banjo, and viola, and is widely known and just as widely loved for her diverse musical collaborations, including appearances on Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ‘Em (that’s her on banjo and viola), and her Pulitzer prize-winning opera co-written with film composer Michael Abels (he scored Get Out). This year, she contributed to the Sinners soundtrack. (She keeps busy.)
Last week, Rhiannon and friends (technically, “Rhiannon Giddens and The Old-Time Revue”) dropped by Toronto for a pair of sold-out performances at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall. Embracing her self-proclaimed “lifelong mission” to celebrate the many criminally overlooked (typically female and BIPOC) musicians and creators from across the history of North American music, the show was a wonderful showcase for the superstar that is Rhiannon Giddens.
The evening began with a short opener, bandmates Demeanor (Justin Harrington) and Amelia Rose Powell offering up essentially a warm-up act, with cross-genre songs like Demeanor’s “Go You One Hundred”.
It was a nice touch, Giddens handing over the floor to her two youngest bandmates, and that generosity of spirit shone throughout the evening, with Giddens regularly handing over the floor to a bandmate, whether to sing lead vocals or for a bit of audience work as the rest of the band got ready.
Still, it was Rhiannon we were here to see, and on that front, the show delivered. A wonderful, engaging, intelligent performer, Giddens’s ability to interweave stories with music, provide necessary (and all-too-often missing) contextual background for the songs and musical forms on display, made the evening so much more than a straightforward gig. It was, we were pleased to learn, Giddens’s fourth appearance at Koerner Hall, testament to a warm relationship between the performer and her many Canadian fans. (In fact, Giddens has a number of noteworthy Canadian collaborations, including working with Daniel Lanois on the Red Dead 2 soundtrack and forming a music collective with Allison Russell.)
Highlights of the evening included “Red Bird Road” (originally recorded solo by bandmate Dirk Powell), the traditional Congolese song “Pipi Danga”, and a cover of Etta Baker’s “Marching Jaybird”, which Giddens recently recorded with bandmate (fiddler, vocalist) Justin Robinson for their new album What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow.
Those who stuck around for the encore were treated with a rather unique offering, one that’s almost certainly not showing up on her U.S. tour dates: “Un Canadien errant”, a 19th century ballad/folk tune written by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie in tribute to the vanquished (i.e., the dead, the exiled) in the aftermath of the Lower Canada Rebellion. It’s a relatively obscure pick – it appears on a late-career Leonard Cohen album, and more recently, in a recording by Whitehorse on the soundtrack for the Joshua Jackson Canadian road trip movie One Week – but a wonderful one to close out the show. In addition to being a lovely tune, it only further demonstrates Giddens’s commitment to unearthing the musical history of the places she visits.
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Keep track of everything Rhiannon Giddens, including upcoming tour dates, here.
The Koerner season is winding down at the Royal Conservatory of Music, but the new season announcement is coming soon.
