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The eighth-annual Festival Vancouver rolls out from August 3 to 17 with a splash of concerts that covers the waterfront with music from classical to world beat to jazz.
The festival takes place at nine venues all over the city ranging from the Orpheum and the Chan Centre to smaller places like the Norman Rothstein Theatre and The Cellar Jazz Club.
In terms of general excellence, it seemed that last year's festival was the best until then. But this year's looks promising, too. A talk with festival producer George Laverock revealed that ticket sales were well ahead of where they normally are as of the time that we talked (one-third had been sold and advertising hadn't even started), suggesting that Vancouver really has embraced Festival Vancouver as part of August in the city. The budget averages $2 million on a reasonable expectation of about 25,000 people.
Each year the festival adopts a part of the world as its theme. Last year it was the Nordic countries. This year it's the music of the Americas -- North, South and Central and the United States.
"I knew it was going to be a hot item in our continuing attempt to scour the earth for its best talent," Laverock says. "And we had no trouble coming up with it." Roughly half the concerts will adhere to the idea of the music of the Americas, whether it's choral, a string quartet, a guitar program or jazz.
Of the various series in the festival, this year's has a couple of new ones, one of them outdoors at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. Risky as it is, people are invited to bring a blanket or a deck chair and groove to the Finnish a cappella group Rajaton (Aug. 13) in their third return to the festival, or to the Yamandu Costa Trio from Brazil (Aug. 15) or to the Salsa Dura trio (Aug. 17) featuring the Cuban pianist Ernàn López-Nussa, playing with Sal Ferreras and Celso Machado.
Yamandu Costa with his seven-string guitar is a phenomenon, says Laverock, who was knocked out by him when he spent a week in Buenos Aires talent-scouting and then tracked him down on the Internet. It turns out that Costa had played the Norman Rothstein here a few years ago and the event sold out almost immediately.
The other new series is a piano series -- a first-ever, go figure. The Piano Passion Series, Aug. 6, 8, 12 and 14 at Christ Church Cathedral presents Sara Davis Buechner in a program of Cuban, American and Canadian composers; Fernando Pérez from Argentina; the Bergmann Duo of Elizabeth and Marcel Bergmann; and Ernán López-Nussa.
There's almost too much to mention but you'd have to say something about the mainstage shows.
Things are officially launched by the Gala Opera Evening, Tuesday Aug. 5 at the Orpheum. This stars the American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and the Montreal soprano Marianne Fiset with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra conducted by Mario Bernardi. Fiset, says Laverock, "knocked everybody out" when she won the 2007 International Voice Competition in Montreal, and is now hotly in demand. Graves has sung here before. Raised in Washington D.C., she now lives in Paris. She's one of the best Carmens around and was one of the most pleasant interview subjects I've ever had.
Explosion Africaine, Aug. 7 at the Chan, is supposed to be something else -- dancers, drummers and singers from Guinea in West Africa.
Considerably less explosive, though that term is only relative, the Leipzig String Quartet make a long overdue return to Vancouver with a program of Beethoven, Stravinsky and Mendelssohn on Aug. 9 at the Chan.
Brahms's German Requiem, a galvanizingly serious and unforgettable piece of music, is jointly undertaken by the massed choirs of Grupo de Canto Coral from Argentina and the Vancouver Cantata Singers under the direction of Nestor Andronacci and it has the piano-duo version that Brahms preferred, not orchestra. It's only 65 minutes long, so the first half will feature each choir in its own material. In the Brahms, the soloists are soprano Donna Brown and baritone Tyler Duncan. That's on Aug. 10, Chan. And on Aug. 14, also at the Chan, is the big annual co-production with Vancouver Early Music. This time it's Rameau's Pygmalion which he miraculously put together in eight days. With singers Suzie LeBlanc, Nathalie Paulin, Catherine Webster, Matthew White, Colin Balzer, Lawrence Wiliford and Tyler Duncan and a consortium of players.
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Font:****And the Ju Percussion Group from Taiwan, 10 members, is said to be amazing (Aug. 16, Chan Centre).
In real festival style, you can take in a full day of string quartets and they're no mean ones. On Aug. 10, Christ Church Cathedral offers The Borealis playing Imant Raminsh and Beethoven's "The Harp" at 1:30 p.m; the Alcan String Quartet playing Ginastera, Brandao, Bragato and José Evangelist at 3:30 p.m. and at 5:30 p.m., the Lafayette String Quartet playing R. Murray Schafer's 11th quartet (commissioned by the group) and works by Samuel Barber and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Choirs? Lots of them, in a 5:30 p.m. series at Christ Church: Grupo De Canto Coral, Aug. 4; the famous Lyon Chamber Choir, Aug. 7; the Danish National Girls Choir, Aug. 11; and Vancouver's great musica intima, Aug. 15.
That isn't all. But try not to miss the harp, flute, viola ensemble, Trio Verlaine 10:30 a.m., or pianist Linda Lee Thomas in Tango Encounter, 3:30 p.m. with bassist Miles Hill and not a bandoneonist this time but a harmonica player -- Franco Luciani from Buenos Aires. Both at Christ Church.
ldykk@png.canwest.com
More information at www.festivalvancouver.ca. Tickets at Ticketmaster.ca or 604-280-3311.
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