The 2010 Brott Festival is underway in Hamilton. It is one of Canada’s largest classical summer music festivals stretching over a three month period where other professional orchestras down the QEW are on summer break. Boris Brott created this festival with a goal in mind: to create an orchestra that trains recent graduates from music schools across Canada and prepare them for the life of sitting in a more professional setting. According to the Brott Festival website, the National Academy Orchestra has graduated over 1,000 new musicians who have held positions in every major orchestra across Canada.
The Brott Festival’s “Summer Night at the Proms”, sponsored by ArcelorMittal Dofasco, on July 14th 2010 was just as successful as its British counterpart at Royal Albert Hall. The Proms concerts are an eight week summer music festival where audience members can sit or can stroll throughout the hall during the concert, culminating in the highly popular Last Night at the Proms with all of its British patriotic glory.
Guest Conductor Brian Jackson, the principal Pops Conductor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, is no stranger to the festival. He is a renowned concert pianist and organist. Maestro Jackson led the orchestra through some of the most exuberant and colourful music that I have heard from the British Isles to create a concert that was easily accessible, and highly enjoyable.
The concert began with a staple of British music, an overture to the 1888 operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan entitled The Yeomen of the Guard. Eric Coates’ London Everyday Suite, which featured tributes to the bustling Convent Garden in a tarantella—the irony here being that the tarantella is Italian—, to the reflective Westminster Palace, and a rousing tribute to Knightsbridge that showcased different sections of the orchestra in alternation. The Cornish Rhapsody by Hubert Bath, a mini piano concerto featured in the 1944 British film Love Story, showcased the talents of apprentice conductor Samuel Tam who showed poise and confidence on the conductor’s podium while Jackson displayed virtuosity on the piano. In a medley of traditional sea songs by Sir Henry Wood entitled Fantasy on British Sea Songs, a traditional piece at any Proms concert, featured a light hearted moment where the clarinet player engaged in a long winded solo that had every orchestra member engaged in their own proms moment, wandering from their respective positions to engage in other activities. With traditional anthems like Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory, or Parry’s Jerusalem, or God Save the Queen, the entire audience in Mohawk’s McIntyre Theatre stood and sang along.
But it was Frederick Delius’ Walk to Paradise Garden that was a definite highlight of the concert. This selection of music was so beautifully crafted, giving every audience member the feeling that they were walking unimpeded by the oppressive heat in an English country garden. Soft oboes, beautiful cellos, an impassioned climax, it all made this piece give you this warm feeling inside. After the piece had concluded, Jackson announced that the orchestra got the piece from a Michigan publishing house on Monday, and commended the orchestra on its thorough and imaginative reading of the work. Every edition of the NAO seems to be better than the one before. It is a real treat to watch the orchestra mature each year.
The Brott Festival runs until August 20th 2010. For a complete listing of concerts and prices, please go to www.brottmusic.com.
