Bamfield festival attracts top performers
Bamfield, a tiny community that bestrides a sheltered inlet on the south shore of Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, has been home to a highprofile summer music festival, Music by the Sea, since 2006.
The festival has flourished, despite its remoteness — or perhaps because of it, isolation and quiet being highly conducive to concentrated music-making. Over the years, it has attracted topnotch performers, substantial audiences and excellent word-ofmouth, and it has been embraced by the town, on which it makes a significant economic impact.
The 13th season of Music by the Sea will begin on July 21 and as usual will comprise eight evening concerts (8:30 p.m.) and two Sunday-noon matinées, held in an intimate, glass-walled space within the Rix Centre for Ocean Discoveries. Seating about 150, this space boasts a scallop-shellshaped roof, excellent acoustics and spectacular scenic views of Bamfield Inlet. The festival very plausibly claims that it is “the most inspiring venue anywhere in the Pacific Northwest.”
The concerts are spread over two four-day “weeks,” in between which, on July 25, is a special Community Day, a collaboration with the local Huu-ay-aht First Nation that includes a luncheon and music circle (noon) and a free concert (7:30 p.m.).
In each of this year’s concerts, the programming, as always, will be divided more or less evenly between classical music and jazz. There will be 27 performers in all, 21 of them classical artists, from Banff, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, San Francisco, Miami and even farther afield — England, Spain, Norway. Among the few locals performing this season is Christopher Donison, the festival’s founder, CEO and executive artistic director, who is a musical polymath — pianist, conductor, composer, librettist, lecturer, inventor, impresario.
Almost half of this year’s classical artists are string players, some of them well known (violinist Aaron Schwebel, violist Keith Hamm). Other performers include guitarists Jacob Cordover and Runar Kjeldsberg, mezzosopranos Nan Hughes and Jazimina MacNeil and Boston-based pianist Marc Ryser, who has been with the festival from the start and remains its artistic adviser.
But there are no stars; the festival seeks to foster a sense of community among its musicians.
Six of the string players are the participants in the annual Fellowship Artist Mentorship Programme, emerging artists who, in the 10 days preceding the festival, work intensively with two seasoned professionals, Ryser and Cecily Ward, a London-based American violinist. The fellows will perform in various repertoire in the festival’s first three concerts, including as a group in Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), the young Schoenberg’s glorious tone poem for string sextet.
The classical lineup includes some performers who are new to Music by the Sea this year, others who are returnees, and among the latter are some who first participated in the festival as fellowship students.
Of the six jazz artists (trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass, drums), half are from Toronto, the others from B.C. — trumpeter Brad Turner, drummer Buff Allen and Donison, who will accompany Hughes and MacNeil in selections from the American Songbook. (The jazz programming is never given out in advance, but is only announced from the stage.)
The classical programming is now mostly set, and is particularly rich in masterpieces of the standard chamber-music repertoire: two string quartets by Haydn; Mozart’s G-minor piano quartet; Beethoven’s pastoral Op. 96 violin sonata; Mendelssohn's perennially popular Octet; Dvorák’s String Sextet; Grieg’s Holberg Suite; Shostakovich’s mighty Piano Quintet; David Popper’s Requiem for three cellos and piano.
The vocal repertoire will include songs by Purcell, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Britten and others; song cycles by Alexander Zemlinsky, Federico García Lorca and Gerald Finzi; and selections from operas by Offenbach and Massenet.
There will also be a very wide range of guitar music — solos, duets, works for one or two guitars with strings, by a lineup of composers spanning several centuries, including some familiar names (Ginastera, Villa-Lobos) as well as some intriguingly unfamiliar ones: de Lhoyer, de Fossa, Duphly, Giuliani, Gismonti, Koshkin. And the July 28 concert will include a world première: Baladas del Decemarón Negro, a quintet for guitar and strings by Leo Brouwer, an important Cuban guitarist and composer.