Tag: Ottawa

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” the focus is on our friends to the north – all music associated, in one way or another, with Canada. We’ll hear works by Canadian composers Healey Willan and Robert Farnon, including Farnon’s “Ottawa” Symphony, with a few of his light music classics tossed into the bargain.

Neither Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek nor Ralph Vaughan Williams were Canadian, but both wrote music associated with the Great White North. Television audiences of the late 1950s would come to associate Reznicek’s best-known music with the North-West Mounted Police, during the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, when his “Donna Diana Overture” was appropriated as the theme for “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.” And what a performance we’ll hear, with Hermann Scherchen conducting, in a recording that was made contemporaneously with the run of the show!

Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the Powell-Pressburger film “49th Parallel,” in which patriotic Canadian citizens save our bacon from Nazi invasion. Raymond Massey beating the tar out of a Nazi? Now that’s the kind of propaganda I can get behind!

I’ll be ladling out the syrup and the pancakes will be fluffy, as we salute Canada on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!

Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/