Sean Lennon performs at annual Christmas concert with Rufus and Martha Wainwright and family
The New York Times
December 16, 2011
In the Tradition of a Matriarch, This Family Keeps Crooning and Caroling
“A Not So Silent Night,” the concert at Town Hall on Thursday, was a typical Christmastime family gathering: motley, convivial, multigenerational, jokey, affectionate, conscious of passing years and tinged with both skepticism and faith. There wasn’t any bickering, though. The family onstage happens to be packed with singers and songwriters — troupers all — and this year the next generation was resuming a tradition.Rufus and Martha Wainwright, children of the songwriters Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, have taken up their mother’s annual Christmas-concert-cum-family-reunion project, which was last presented in New York City in 2008; she died in 2010. This year’s show, a benefit for the Kate McGarrigle Fund for Sarcoma Research, easily reclaimed the homey charm of its predecessors, in a concert that hopscotched through the Christmas repertory, from old carols to brand-new songs, from hymns to Tin Pan Alley to rock. The wardrobe featured glitter, tinsel and quasi-medieval costumes, although Ms. Wainwright’s top was apparently from a marching band uniform.Friends were there too, including Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Marianne Faithfull, as well as a coterie of second-generation songwriters: Sean Lennon, who led a singalong of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and Jenni Muldaur and Teddy Thompson, who teased through “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”Mr. Reed had family in mind, with his guitar tolling as he sang John Lennon’s desolate “Mother,” joined by Sean Lennon on piano.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/arts/music/wainwright-and-mcgarrigle-families-at-town-hall-review.html?_r=1