Celebrate peace with war music
Tchaikovsky’s overture highlights concert series honouring anniversary
No guns were fired but the rhetoric was just as fierce in the battle over Project Niagara as it was two centuries earlier in the War of 1812.
The upshot: Plans for a mega music festival, officially known as Project Niagara but nicknamed Tanglewood North, were officially abandoned two years ago.
Now that the smoke has cleared, the mini music festival that filled the region’s air with sweet sounds of mid-summer is still in business, operating for four weeks in small venues on a $300,000 budget.
In 2012, Music Niagara is making as much music as possible over the 200th anniversary of that war between Canada and the United States, especially the decisive battles that took place on Niagara’s home turf.
“We’re very happy to present a series of concerts on themes related to the War of 1812, including Tchaikovsky’s stupendous 1812 Overture,” says artistic director Atis Bankas, who founded Music Niagara.
“Luckily there was a lot of great music associated with the war,” says Chris Blake, executive director of the festival. For its 14th season, the festival’s four-week program takes advantage of that fact.
Of course, much of the musical legacy came from the Old World rather than the new. But it is appropriate to play that music as part of this bicentennial event, because the North American conflict was just part of a global phenomenon known as the Napoleonic Wars.
Acknowledging that link opens the way for Music Niagara to program European music of the period while marking what it tactfully celebrates as “200 years of peace” between Canada and the U.S. — deftly sidestepping the endless argument about which side won and which side lost the war.
Given that context, nothing could be more appropriate to open this year’s festival than Ludwig van Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto, otherwise known as the Emperor Concerto. The opening gala is set for St. Mark’s Church, one of Music Niagara’s regular intimate spaces, on Sat., July 14 at 7:30 pm.
Consider its history. The last of Beethoven’ piano concertos was written between 1809 and 1811, and dedicated to Archduke Rudolf — the composer’s patron and pupil. It was first heard in Leipzig on Nov. 28, 1811, with Friedrich Schneider at the keyboard. Its Vienna premiere took place in early 1812, when the pianist was Carl Czerny, another of the composer’s protégés.
Now 200 years later, the pianist playing the concerto in Niagara will be the phenomenal Stewart Goodyear, fresh from his star turn at Toronto’s Luminato festival, where he is undertaking the challenge of playing all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a single day at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall.
Continuing the war theme, the award-winning National Youth Orchestra of Canada will include Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a July 29 concert at the Jackson-Triggs Niagara Estate outdoor amphitheatre. (Music by Prokofiev, Dvorak and Gershwin is also featured.)
On July 30, Lori Gemmell of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony will show how harp music was developed in the early 1800s, while vocalist Patricia O’Callaghan sings songs by Beethoven and Haydn, set to the poems of Robert Burns. On Aug. 2, Music Niagara offers two new works commissioned in honour of the bicentennial: 1812 Capriccio by Russia’s Mikhail Bronner and Queenston Heights Rhapsody by Canada’s Dmitriy Varelas. On Aug. 11, the St. Mark’s Orchestra and the Vocalis Chamber Choir join forces on Haydn’s Mass for Troubled Times, composed in the late 1790s to reflect fears of the era over the Napoleonic threat. All that’s missing is a requiem lamenting the demise of Project Niagara. It seemed like a great idea. It was planned as the summer home of two major Canadian orchestras: Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It had a magical site on federal waterfront land provided by Parks Canada and Environment Canada. Plans called for an amphitheatre and lawn seating.
Five years of planning and negotiation went into the project, which was supposed to draw music lovers from both Canada and the U.S. and pump $100 million of extra tourist revenue into the Niagara region.
But opponents complained the result would be more traffic and noise than tranquility-loving Niagara residents could tolerate. The result was political controversy that made governments wary of supporting it. Finally, in July 2010, organizers admitted it was unlikely they could attract the required funding.