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/
Tag: Toronto
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A Canadian Pancake Breakfast on “Sweetness and Light”
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Remembering Jeanne Lamon Tafelmusik’s Legacy
I was extremely sorry to learn yesterday of the death of Jeanne Lamon.
Lamon was probably best-known as music director of Tafelmusik, the Toronto-based Baroque orchestra she directed for 33 years. In fact, so associated had she been with the Canadian cultural scene, I was surprised to learn, a number of years ago, that she was actually born in New York City. She didn’t move to Toronto until 1981. It was in 1988 that she became a Canadian citizen.
Lamon taught at the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music. Among her honors, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2000. She was also made a member or the Order of Ontario in 2014. 2014 was the year she stepped down from her directorship of Tafelmusik to pursue other projects, recording, performing, and touring as a solo violinist. But she remained connected to the group, traveling the globe with the orchestra as part of its “Galileo Project” and gracing its promotional material as Music Director Emerita.
Her records with Tafelmusik vastly enriched my appreciation of music of the Baroque and Classical Eras. A number of them are still among my favorites. I am particularly fond of her collaborations with Anner Bylsma, who recorded cello concertos by Boccherini, Haydn, and Anton Kraft. Looking back on these, recorded now some thirty years ago, it is difficult to comprehend the passage of time.
Lamon was 71 years-old. R.I.P.
CBC obituary, with performance videos:
https://www.cbc.ca/music/jeanne-lamon-violinist-and-former-tafelmusik-director-dead-at-71-1.5926256
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