[4] From 2006 to 2009, he also hosted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Unmasked series of concerts, working with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Hans Graf and Peter Oundjian.
With Oundjian he co-created Eight Days in June, a "festival of music and thought" that was described by the Detroit Free Press as a "chaotic success".
[7] He received the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for Rolling Home, his memoir of a cross-Canada rail journey.
[8] Since 2010, in collaboration with his life partner Lori Gemmell (harpist) Allen has been creating shows that mix storytelling, history and music.
Titles include 2012's Bohemians in Brooklyn'', a cabaret-style revue based upon the lives of the musicians and writers living in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s, The Missing Pages''[2] (about Theodore Molt, the only Canadian to meet Ludwig van Beethoven), Being Lost, created with longtime friend and CBC producer Jeff Reilly, about American composer John Cage's misadventures in the woods of northern Saskatchewan in 1965 and, most recently, JS Bach's Long Walk in the Snow, about 20 year-old Johann Sebastian Bach walking 400 kilometres in 1705.