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The New Brunswick Youth Orchestra will be the only orchestra representing Canada at the Summa Cum Laude International Youth Music Competition in Austria next summer.
'We're excited and honoured to represent New Brunswick and Canada in this prestigious competition,' NBYO president Ken MacLeod said in a press release. 'And for several of our orchestra members, this will be their first exposure to an international audience.' In July 2014, musicians will compete on the home stage of the famous Vienna Philharmonic with the world premiere of a work commissioned by the NBYO to mark the centennial of the beginning of the First World War and its significance to Canada.
They 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,' MacLeod said.
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 are collaborators in the project, which has been named 'Keeping Faith.' This is not the first time the NBYO has played in Austria: In July 2011 the orchestra played in several venues in Vienna and released the related CD Musikfreunde: Friends of Music.
After the 2014 competition, musicians will play at two other sites in Vienna, as well as in famous music venues in Munich, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic.
The orchestra will return to perform its new work in concerts at five locations in New Brunswick during its 2014-2015 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.
