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Arts festival to host McGarrigle tribute

When the family of folksinger Kate McGarrigle staged a tribute concert five months after her 2010 death they could hardly get through the songs, says her sister Anna.

TORONTO — When the family of folksinger Kate McGarrigle staged a tribute concert five months after her 2010 death they could hardly get through the songs, says her sister Anna.

“I found the whole experience so incredibly moving,” McGarrigle, who was also Kate’s longtime musical partner, said Wednesday as Toronto’s Luminato arts festival announced it will feature a similar tribute concert this summer.

“People were just sort of breaking down in tears behind the scenes as they would get onstage, just because it was almost too much to bear.

“So now it’s more a joyous thing.”

Love Over and Over: The Songs of Kate McGarrigle will play June 15 at Massey Hall with the late musician’s sisters, Anna and Jane, her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and her niece and nephew, Lily and Sylvan Lanken. Other artists on the bill include Emmylou Harris, Bruce Cockburn, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Robert Charlebois, and some members of Broken Social Scene and Stars.

First staged in London in June 2010, the tribute concert has also run in New York. Each city has featured different artists and the Luminato showcase is billed as the Canadian tribute.

A portion of the proceeds from the show will go to the Kate McGarrigle Fund, created to further research into clear-cell sarcoma, which took her life in January 2010 in Montreal.

The concert is a fitting tribute as the singer-songwriter loved performing, said McGarrigle, who produced 10 albums with her sister.

“When she was onstage, she could forget all her troubles. Being onstage has a way of focusing you that way. You don’t feel any pain. So (her children) just wanted to keep her spirit alive.”

Luminato 2012 will also feature an onstage chat with CanLit legend Alice Munro, who has done few public appearances in recent years.

The literary treasure will discuss her career with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

Other acclaimed authors set to appear at the festival include Michael Ondaatje, Linden MacIntyre, Irvine Welsh, Peter Carey and Vincent Lam.

Another festival highlight is Playing Cards 1: SPADES, a new production from Quebec theatre master Robert Lepage.

It’s the first in a projected four-part theatre series that explores global conflict, and it runs three hours long.

Luminato’s new artistic director, Jorn Weisbrodt, said the show is “truly Lepage at his best” and is “a tornado of a production” — literally, as there will be a tornado onstage.

Playing Cards 1 is one of several marathon productions in the lineup for the festival, now into its sixth year.

Einstein on the Beach, An Opera in Four Acts runs five hours and is a reconstructed version of the acclaimed Robert Wilson and Philip Glass work that they first produced in 1976. This is the international tour of the production, which hasn’t been revived in 20 years and features music, poetry and abstract dance.

Meanwhile, pianist Stewart Goodyear will be featured in The Beethoven Marathon, in which he’ll perform all 32 of the composer’s sonatas, in the order they were composed, in one day.

Other events on the docket include La Belle et la Bete: A Contemporary Retelling, a multidisciplinary work that puts a high-tech spin on the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.

It’s created by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon of Montreal-based Lemieux Pilon 4D Art.

Hip-hop artists K’naan and Kae Sun will open Luminato with a free concert — one of several in the lineup that will also see performances from Rufus Wainwright and Loreena McKennitt, among others.

Incidentally, Wainwright — whose Prima Donna opera ran at Luminato in 2010 — is engaged to German-born Weisbrodt and has a daughter with him.

But Weisbrodt, 39, said his introduction to Luminato did not involve Wainwright, and came when he approached the festival about producing Einstein on the Beach.

“What really attracted me about the festival is that it wants to encompass all these creative disciplines,” said Weisbrodt, Wilson’s former manager and agent.

Those disciplines also include magic, dance, film, food, and visual arts.

Several events are also lined up to celebrate the bicentennial of the War of 1812, including the large-scale art installation The Encampment, from Thomas+Guinevere, and the world premiere of Laura’s Cow, a family opera about the Canadian heroine Laura Secord.