Rufus & Martha Wainwright | Cri de Noël  

This annual holiday celebration has its roots in the childhood home of Rufus and Martha’s mother, the Canadian folk legend Kate McGarrigle. The family would carol in the living room of their wooden home in the Laurentian mountain town of St. Sauveur. This is very much still the spirit of these holiday shows that Kate, and later her children, brought to major concert halls around the world, from London’s Royal Festival Hall and Dublin’s National Concert Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. When Kate was tragically diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, she began to raise money and awareness for funding research into the disease as at the time there were no drugs available to treat it. In December 2009, she bravely performed her last family Christmas concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. For that show, she wrote a heartbreaking song, “Proserpina,” that tells the story of Hera bemoaning the loss of her daughter Proserpina who married Hades and would live with him for half of the year in the underworld and would return to her mother in the spring and summer bringing warmth and light. It mirrored her own situation as her daughter Martha was bound in London after the premature birth of her son Arcangelo and could not travel home to be with her dying mother. 
  
Rufus and Martha continue Kate’s legacy with the Christmas shows, helping to raise awareness and money for the Kate McGarrigle Foundation for Sarcoma Research and the Canadian Cystinosis Research Foundation.