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The New Brunswick Youth Orchestra will represent Canada when it returns to Austria in July 2014 as the only Canadian orchestra in the Summa Cum Laude International Youth Music Competition.
On July 5, the orchestra’s competition entry will be the world premiere of an orchestral work commissioned by it to mark the centennial of the beginning of the First World War, and its significance to Canada.
From the home stage of the Vienna Philharmonic, in the country at the heart of events leading to the conflict, the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra will pay musical tribute to those who paid deeply for the war, and issue an orchestral call to a future built on tolerance, understanding and dialogue.
This is a return engagement for the orchestra. In July 2011 it played in several venues in Vienna, and released the related CD Musikfreunde: Friends of Music.
After the 2014 competition, New Brunswick’s musicians will play at two other sites in Vienna, as well as in famous music venues in Munich, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic, opportunities being managed by the Summa Cum Laude International Youth Music Festival.
The orchestra will return to perform its new work as part of concerts at five locations in New Brunswick during the 2014-15 season, as well as in Ottawa. The tour’s music will also be recorded for a CD to be released in the fall of 2014.
Photo: Oleksandr Onyshchenko
“We’re excited and honoured to represent New Brunswick and Canada in this prestigious competition,” said youth orchestra president Ken MacLeod. “And for several of our orchestra members, this will be their first exposure to an international audience.
“We’ve seen in our travel to New York, China, Italy and Austria that such opportunities are transformational for the individual young people. And the venues and audiences raise the level of playing for the orchestra as a whole. So giving young people these advanced opportunities is a priority for the NBYO.”
He said the intent in commissioning an orchestral work is not to glorify war or revel in an allied triumph but to educate a current generation about the First World War,
“We want to honour veterans and their sacrifice and acknowledge what the war cost Canadian families and communities, and the impact the war had on Canada as a nation. We want the music help raise awareness about the importance of tolerance, international understanding and peace,” MacLeod said.
The project will include create input and resources from many collaborators including the University of New Brunswick Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, the Canadian Music Centre, the New Brunswick Museum, the Canadian War Museum and Hemmings House Pictures.
“Because of our debt to those who paid an enormous price,” said MacLeod, “we have named the entire project – the competition, the tour, the original music, and educational materials we are producing – as Keeping Faith ." With no veterans of the war alive today, he said, the youth orchestra’s biggest challenge is “to go beyond respectful commemoration, to education, to avoid the mistakes of the past, treasure what we have in the present and create a more peaceful future.”
“What better way to keep faith than by harnessing the idealism, genius, hope and promise of our youth to build the world that their first world war counterparts dreamed of?” he asked.
