October 12, 2004 -

OTTAWA, CANADA -- Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, featuring Music Director Pinchas Zukerman as conductor and violin soloist, will head to British Columbia for a 10-day concert and education tour from November 8 to 18, 2004, presenting four concerts, four student matinees and over 75 additional education events. It will be the NAC Orchestra’s first visit to British Columbia since the 1999 Canada Tour.

The BC Tour will see the NAC Orchestra performing concerts in Vancouver (Nov. 10), Kelowna (Nov. 13), Vernon (Nov. 14) and Victoria (Nov. 18 – a fundraiser for the Victoria Symphony and the Victoria Conservatory of Music), and student matinees in Burnaby (Nov. 12), Kelowna (Nov. 15) and Comox (2 concerts Nov. 16). Additional community outreach will take smaller ensembles to Coquitlam, Kispiox, Nelson, Richmond, Smithers, Terrace and Winlaw. Following the BC Tour, the Orchestra will perform a concert in Toronto on Nov. 20.

As always when this Orchestra tours, education will play as important a part as the concerts themselves. The over 75 education events include visits by smaller brass, wind and string ensembles from the NAC Orchestra to remote communities in the north and southeast interior of BC to perform for First Nations children; masterclasses to advanced music students, and sectional rehearsals with youth and community orchestras led by Pinchas Zukerman and musicians of the orchestra; distribution of the NAC’s latest teacher resource kit, Vivaldi and the Four Seasons, to every elementary school in BC; school visits including performances and Q&As; coaching sessions for school bands; a series of composition lectures and masterclasses led by NAC Award Composer Alexina Louie; and “Music Bridge II” linking children in BC, Newfoundland, and Ottawa as part of a Day of Distance Learning. More than 60 partners are assisting with these outreach activities, and Yamaha Canada has provided 800 recorders plus recorder instruction to bring recorder programs to communities and schools.

The National Arts Centre Orchestra British Columbia Tour is supported by Major Partner CN, which has a 90-year history in BC. The National Post is the Tour’s National Media Partner. Special funding for tour educational activities is generously provided by Yamaha Canada, Alcan-Kitimat Works, and donors and sponsors of the National Youth and Education Trust.

Pinchas Zukerman is world-renowned for his dedication to teaching and to the musical development of the next generation of young artists, and he passionately believes that every child should have access to a musical education. He is the driving force behind the leading national role the National Arts Centre plays in education and community outreach, and in the use of new technology to reach Canadians from coast to coast. A number of the many education activities on tour will be accessible across Canada and internationally through the NAC’s education website at www.ArtsAlive.ca.

Pinchas Zukerman said: “British Columbia is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I love the people and the atmosphere and I’m looking forward to performing with the NAC Orchestra in cities I haven’t yet visited. I’m very proud of the programme that our Education Department has organized that allows the NAC to bring music to some of the smaller communities and to put in place programmes that will have lasting benefits.”

Peter Herrndorf, President and CEO of the National Arts Centre, said: “The NAC is proud to continue the rich tradition of NAC Orchestra Tours. No other orchestra in North America demonstrates this level of commitment to education while on tour. At Canada’s National Arts Centre we have a responsibility to share great music and teaching with Canadians across the country, and we are delighted that so many partners – from the education, corporate and artistic communities – have come together to make possible our tour to British Columbia.”

Repertoire on tour includes the first four movements of Mozart’s “Haffner” Serenade No. 7 in D major featuring Pinchas Zukerman as violin soloist, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major. The concert programme will also feature the NAC-commissioned orchestration of Bringing the Tiger Down From the Mountain II by Canadian composer Alexina Louie. This work originally composed for cello and piano, now arranged for full orchestra, will feature NAC Orchestra Juno Award-winning principal cello Amanda Forsyth, who maintains an active international touring schedule as a soloist together with her orchestral career.

Born in Vancouver, Alexina Louie is one of three composers named as recipients of the National Arts Centre’s Composer Awards of $75,000 under the National Arts Centre New Music Plan launched in 2002. Louie will join the NAC Orchestra on tour leading composition lectures and masterclasses with high school and university music students, and workshops with young piano students. She will give pre-concert talks one hour before each of the four public concerts.

The NAC Orchestra will bring its highly successful recipe for Student Matinees on tour to BC. The NAC Orchestra’s Principal Youth and Family Conductor Boris Brott will conduct three student matinees focusing on the life and times of Vivaldi. Rosemary Thomson, resident conductor of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, will be the guest conductor for one more.

The matinees are hosted by First Nations musician and storyteller Nathalie Picard, and feature Métis opera singer Melody Mercredi. Students will be invited to sing or perform on recorders a melody from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the NAC Orchestra.

Yamaha Canada is providing a total of 600 free recorders to school boards for distribution to as many lucky students attending these student matinees. Recorder clinics sponsored by Yamaha Canada and their local distributors have been arranged in Burnaby, and Kelowna in preparation for the student matinees.

The students will prepare for the matinees through Vivaldi and the Four Seasons, a teacher resource kit on the life, times and music of Vivaldi produced by the National Arts Centre. The kit will be distributed to elementary schools in British Columbia in the fall of 2004, with additional distribution to the rest of Canada in 2005. The kit includes an original children’s story written especially for the NAC by C.J. Taylor, an award-winning author of Mohawk origin, and is illustrated by internationally renowned artist George Littlechild of the Cree Nation. The Teacher's Kit was sponsored by CN, National Post, Ottawa Citizen and the Government of Canada’s One-Tonne Challenge.

Each Vivaldi kit also includes a complimentary copy of the CBC Records VIVALDI: FOUR SEASONS CD, featuring Pinchas Zukerman and the NAC Orchestra.

With the support of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, two of the student matinees with Boris Brott will take place in the Comox Valley in northern Vancouver Island on November 16, the first time a symphony orchestra has performed for a purely student audience there. 1,800 mainly Aboriginal students will attend the two matinees in the gymnasium of Highland Secondary School on land belonging to the Comox Nation. Vivaldi kit illustrator and Comox resident George Littlechild will be featured. Between performances, the community will officially welcome the musicians to Comox Territory with a traditional prayer service and performances by Aboriginal artists. The Vancouver Island International Children’s Festival is presenting the NAC Orchestra in Comox.

The Vivaldi and the Four Seasons kit will also be used by 130 children from four First Nations schools in Northern BC to prepare for a music project culminating in a performance with a septet of NAC Orchestra brass musicians at Kispiox Elementary School. At the start of the school year the children will be introduced to the music of Vivaldi, and will learn to sing and play on recorder a melody from The Four Seasons with recorders provided free by Yamaha Canada and recorder instruction provided by a local Yamaha distributor.  The final concert on November 15 will see the children and brass ensemble performing the Vivaldi together for a community audience, as well as sharing their own musical heritage by drumming and singing traditional melodies in their First Nations languages of Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en.

The same day (November 15) a string quintet will head to Winlaw in the southeast BC interior to perform a benefit concert for Artfarm to help raise money for an afterschool music programme for children in the area. The NAC has provided its Vivaldi and the Four Seasons teacher resource kit, and Yamaha Canada has supplied 50 recorders with a local distributor providing recorder instruction so that children can perform with the quintet at the fundraiser. The quintet will also perform in one elementary school in Nelson.

Individual musicians and ensembles will perform and work with children and music students in Smithers, Terrace, Vancouver and Victoria.

A “Music Bridge II” programme on November 9 will use Canada's next-generation Internet, CA*net4, to link elementary school students from Stride Community School in Burnaby, BC, Connaught School in Ottawa, ON, and Bishop Abraham School in St. John’s, NL, to share their interests, their cultures and their creative responses to the music of Vivaldi. That same day of broadband teaching and learning will be used for a brass ensemble masterclass with participants in the three cities, a “Music in Schools” meeting with parents, youth and teachers in three cities, and a workshop session for teachers on music resources from the NAC and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in two cities.

Other new media activities on tour will include video journals from every city the Orchestra visits, and a fully interactive BC Tour website accessible to all Canadians and the world through the “Music” section of the NAC's performing arts education website, www.ArtsAlive.ca.

Additional outreach activities include an “Alma Mater” programme which will see NAC Orchestra musicians from BC return to their high schools to work with young students: principal flute Joanna G’froerer, principal clarinet Kimball Sykes, and flutist Emily Smethurst in Vancouver; and violinist David Thies-Thompson in Victoria.

There will also be masterclasses with Pinchas Zukerman and principal musicians of the Orchestra for advanced students; lectures and composition masterclasses by composer Alexina Louie with students in university, conservatory and community music programs as well as piano masterclasses with young piano students performing works by the composer; sectional rehearsals with community and youth orchestras; and teacher clinics and student sectional rehearsals for middle and high school music programs.

Touring is an important part of the mandate of the National Arts Centre Orchestra which has visited, in its 35-year history, 99 cities in Canada, and 122 cities internationally. The British Columbia Tour is Pinchas Zukerman’s sixth tour with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and fifth since being appointed Music Director in 1998. In 1999 he led the coast-to-coast Canada Tour, followed by Tour 2000 to Israel and Europe. Next came the Atlantic Tour 2002, and the United States and Mexico Tour 2003. As guest conductor and soloist in 1990, Zukerman led the Orchestra on a European Tour.

NAC Orchestra British Columbia Tour 2004: Additional details about educational outreach