Ebb and Flow
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Subscriptions: To purchase tickets to this performance as part of a subscription to 3 or more concerts and receive a 25% discount off the full ticket price, please call Early Music Vancouver’s box office at 604-732-1610 or email boxoffice@earlymusic.bc.
Artists: Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Alexander Weimann, music director; David Greenberg, violin; David McGuinness, keyboard; Fiona Tinwei Lam, Vancouver poet laureate
Join Vancouver’s new Poet Laureate, Fiona T. Lam, EMV’s Artists-in-Residence, and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra in a musical celebration of water.
The Pacific Baroque Orchestra will perform Handel’s Water Music – a suite of highly spirited dance pieces for a small orchestra. Originally intended for outdoor performance, the work premiered on a barge on the river Thames, where it provided entertainment for a royal cruise hosted by King George I of Great Britain on July 17, 1717. The king was so delighted with the new work that he asked to hear it over and over—for a total of four performances. Telemann’s water music, Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth, celebrated the centennial anniversary of the Hamburg Admiralty in 1723. The suite draws upon Hamburg’s geographical location as an important and successful port on the river Elbe. Telemann illustrates the piece with mythological water deities and tone painting. Alasdair MacLean is a Canadian composer living in Nova Scotia. His piece for five strings, The Silken Water is Weaving and Weaving, was inspired by a line from the poem Cape Breton by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1976).
Pre-concert talk: Join us at 6:45 p.m. at the Royal Bank Cinema for a pre-concert interview with Bill Richardson, Fiona T. Lam, Celia Brauer of the False Creek Watershed Society, and author Bruce Macdonald. This talk is included in the live concert ticket price.
The False Creek Watershed Society was created after Brauer’s growing interest in the lost streams of Vancouver. In collaboration with Macdonald, she created a map of Vancouver’s original ecosystem, drawing on documents from the nineteenth century.
“To understand what was here and really embody it, is a supreme act of reconciliation. Because only then can you imagine the world in which local First Nations lived. And then picture what was lost. And what that must have been like for these folks to watch their world be clearcut and paved over. It truly was – for a very long time – the richest place on earth. We cannot bring this back, but if we remember it honestly, we can perhaps bring parts of it back and certainly hold it in ourselves in spirit and cherish it.”
Celia Brauer
This concert is generously supported by Zelie & Vincent Tan, Helen & Frank Elfert, and Mark De Silva.