A Celtic Christmas at Castleton

After Linn Barnes and Allison Hampton brought their popular, long-running “Celtic Christmas Concert” to Castleton’s Theatre House for the first time last year,

Barnes says, the folks at Castleton hired him and Allison on the spot for a return engagement — and that engagement is this Saturday (Dec. 17) at 4 p.m. in the intimate, acoustically perfect 200-seat theater which the late Maestro Lorin Maazel built at his Rappahannock farm.

Barnes and Hampton will be taking the back road to Castleton.

The couple splits their time between D.C., where they perform and primarily teach music, and Rock Mills Road, where they’ve had a hideaway amid the hills for 20 years. Barnes says they come out most Sunday evenings to Rappahannock and usually stay till Thursday — which is why, Barnes says, they’re technically not weekenders but “weekers.”

The two will be performing with their Celtic Consort — a quartet filled out by flutist Joseph Cunliffe and percussionist Steve Bloom, both sought-after musicians in their own right. And, as they have for many of the 39 years they’ve been busy making the annual Celtic Christmas concerts into a “Washington institution” (so said The Washington Post) as part of the Dumbarton Concert Series, Barnes and Hampton also will be sharing the stage with Robert Aubry Davis, cultural fixture and euphonious Washington radio and TV personality, host of WETA’s Emmy-winning “Around Town” and of the national early music program “Millennium of Music” on SiriusFM.

Davis will be reading selections for which Barnes and Hampton specially compose, in styles from the Renaissance era to the present, and perform on Celtic harp (Hampton’s instrument) plus lute, guitar, cittern, mandolin, Irish bagpipes (all of the above by the multi-instrumental Barnes), bodhran, flutes and recorders. Among the highlights are Davis’ readings from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas.

“It’s never quite the same program each time,” says Barnes, who notes that this year, he’s planning to lean on the mandolin — which he plays in a unique way, with finger picks rather than a flat pick. This year also includes a reading from a poem by Langston Hughes, and Barnes says he’ll be doing some finger-style blues guitar to go with it — Delta-style blues guitar being his first musical love many years ago.

Barnes will be playing his prized 1917 Maurer guitar, a work of art itself, in its Brazilian rosewood and European spruce glory. “All of us are, really, instrument nuts. When you’re up there and you’re not playing amplified, you’re really playing for the tone — and that hall,” he says, meaning Castleton’s Theatre House, “is one of the best places we’ve ever played. The acoustics are just phenomenal.”

Asked if she has a favorite part of the Christmas concerts, Hampton demurs, probably wisely.

“It’s hard to single out one thing, really,” she says. “It’s part of the reason we put these things together to be so diverse . . . . I play a solo harp piece, an air from the Isle of Man, and every year we put in one solo harp piece. People will come up to me afterwards and say, “I could listen to a whole concert of that,’ and I usually say, ‘No, you couldn’t.’ ”

Possibly in the pursuit of that diversity, Barnes also just published a novel — a mystery, “Bright Hours: A Cold War Story,” available on Amazon Books. He’s already at work on a sequel, he says. Unlike performing, especially at Christmas, “writing is lonely work. There’s only one thing lonelier than writing a novel, and that’s . . . finishing a novel.”

Tickets ($20 to $40) for the 4 p.m. Saturday Celtic Christmas Concert are available at 540-937-3454 or castletonfestival.org. — Roger Piantadosi