SPLASH!

One identifies, or not. For me, the Victoria Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, swelling up from the anchored barge, had me enthralled. (I’d twice directed the rather complex play, back in ’91, and then ‘09.) It certainly had a national identification for Victoria’s new Maestro, Christian Cluxen, originating as he does from Denmark. With his first performance at Canada’s annual Victoria Splash (since his new appointment to the Symphony,) the sound he orchestrated had a resonance that reached far beyond mere performance; it evoked passion. 

The “Victoria Splash” is very special. Forty thousand people (announcements affirm) congregate every August around a huge barge in the harbor. Sonorous music wells up from under the cavern-like tent. People come to seat themselves with their own portable deck chairs, self-regimented in rows and rows from the dock-side edge along the ledges of the sea wall, and up across the sectioned off streets, and on the green lawns in front of the majestic Empress Hotel, and over the sloping gardens of the magnificently imperious Parliament Building. It is Victoria City’s front-yard celebration of a lifetime.

Kayaks and rowboats cluster and clump and clank gunwales in front of the barge; the best seats in the house. As far as the eye can travel into and amongst the myriad people, there are no police, no authorities; yet there is no alcohol, no smoking; there is just a munching here and there of home-made meals. Some people purchase food from nearby vendors. The smell of caramelized popcorn drifts enticingly. Some people had been there since dawn. Others still come; and the numbers all day grow and grow toward the magical start time of the main event.

At precisely 7:30 p.m., the Maestro arrives! And eventually, in the four-hour length of Canada’s setting sun, in the seemingly made to order absence of wind-gusts or broiling clouds, in the choreographed glides of flocks of silent sea-gulls, in the riveted attention of the vast and superbly polite audience, in the clarity of excellent sound, the harmony of accord and appreciation of both raw and expertly tamed beauty all around, The Victoria Splash goes on and on.

Virtuosity does not necessarily arise out of a single person; it can be a collective of thousands of fingers and movements all streaming together to arrive at a perfect accord.

Yet the solo giftedness of eight year old pianist, Felipe Jiang, with Mozart’s 21^st, was truly mesmerizing. Time stood still. The orchestra played Grieg’s Homecoming, Morning, and In the Hall of the Mountain King, as well as Nielsen’s Maskarade Overture, and Symphony No 2. There was also Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Sibelius’ Finlandia, and the Violin Concerto (with 18 year old Ryan Howland). Korngold’s Seahawk Suite, Lumbye’s Champagne Galop, Lincke’s Berliner Luft came next, and then, of course, the majestic sweep to the thunder of the culminating cannon and fireworks, at about 10.00 p.m., of Tchaikovsky’s 1812. Wow!

Wow. So too for the specialness of each pin-prick of light, wending homewards. In a fairyland of flashlights probing the dark spaces, of small boats and kayaks with Rudolph-like noses plying the dark waters, of lit-up lamp-posts like isolated molecules in the great blanket of the universe, we each are but a bit of light, a sole pin-prick of enlightenment in the dark, wending homewards.

Would that our collective and isolated home-bound fragmentations might also so readily re-unite in harmony and accord, when solo, and apart. Sound for sound. Light for light. Now for now. 

                                                                                        [Photo by J.Neway]