Celebrating all that's British at the Elora Festival this past weekend

My apologies for not writing over the weekend, but I was in dire need of a break and escape, so I did both by heading to Elora for an overnight escape with my far better half and caught one of the final performances of the 2014 edition of the Elora Festival.

This was the final weekend for the 35th edition of the Elora Festival, and from both an artistic and attendance standpoint, the season appears to have been a roaring success.  For three weeks in July each year, artists from around the globe or around the province visit this picturesque little town north-west of Guelph to make music and entertain audiences.

Our second trip of the season saw us once again at the Gambrel Barn on the outskirts of town for the Last Night of the Proms concert Saturday evening.  As Master of Ceremonies John Fraser put it in his opening remarks, it is a chance for us all to don our "rose-coloured glasses" and celebrate all that is British for an evening.

For the first half, though, I worried the audience was not in tune with the celebratory nature of these annual musical love-ins from London; the audience applause was polite and they kept their British and Canadian flags well hidden from view much of the time.  The music perhaps didn't inspire much patriotic fervour, mind you, as it ranged from music from Handel's Zadok the Priest and Let the Bright Seraphim to evergreens like Loch Lomond and Londonderry Air.  A nice touch was the addition of the theme music from Downton Abbey, which proves British musicians can still provide us with a catchy, listenable tune when they choose to.

Perhaps the highlight of the first half - the first of many, actually provided by John Fraser - was his clever, roundabout way of tying the large gaseous planet Jupiter, as in Host's Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity from his Planets Suite, to the Mayor of Toronto.  Much laughter ensued at the Toronto Chief Magistrate's expense.

The second half opened with perhaps a bit too much Gilbert & Sullivan for my liking, featuring several excerpts from Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S. Pinafore.  The highlight was a fetching rendition of I'm Called Little Buttercup, with the soloist being one of the members of the Elora Festival Singers, no less.  Many of the solos were done by members of the Elora Festival Singers, in fact, and each and every one of them would qualify for a solo career in their own right given their talents on display on Saturday night.

Things started to get revved up by the time Elgar's beloved Land of Hope & Glory, from his Pomp & Circumstance March # 1 hit the programme.  Much flag waving and of course, standing for the chorus was in order, and I think we all did our best impression of a Proms audience at Royal Albert Hall at this point.  Of course, there was the requisite Jerusalem and Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations, but after that I started to feel conductor Noel Edison was losing control of things with Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia of Sea Songs.

Here, with an interpolation of the familiar Darth Vader music from Star Wars ushering in the hooded dark knight himself to conduct the remainder of the suite, things started to get a bit silly.  But not a single person in attendance seemed to mind the collective forces on stage letting their hair down and having a grand old time just making music and having fun.  We never did find out who played the role of Darth, incidentally...

The forces of the Elora Festival Singers augmented with members of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the Elora Festival Orchestra, all conducted by Noel Edison all performed admirably, but the evening was strung together quite nicely by that most passionate of Canadian patriots, John Fraser, who regaled us with stories throughout the evening ranging from when he sang Gilbert & Sullivan in his youth to his belated arrival at the evening's concert thanks to his need for a belt to hold his pants up.  No, I won't explain the story here; you had to be there to hear it for yourself.

So, although this was not the final concert of the season, it was certainly a highlight of the final weekend for the Elora Festival, and sent everyone off into the evening humming many familiar tunes on the way home.  If nothing else, it proved you can have a lot of fun with classical music if it is in the right hands:  it takes talent to take chances like we heard on Saturday night.

I love visiting Elora for the Festival each year, and in fact have a secret desire to, once I actually do retire, spend the entire three weeks in Elora and attend each and every performance.  A pipe-dream, perhaps, but a darn nice one...

In a future column I'll write about some of the more interesting non-musical attractions in Elora, should you wish to visit sometime in the future.  Being a very artistic community by nature, there is always something interesting going on in the town.

Incidentally, the Elora Festival Singers will be down this way this coming holiday weekend for a supper concert at St. Mark's Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The concert takes place at 6 pm on Saturday, August 2nd, as part of the Music Niagara concert series now underway.  For more on Music Niagara and to order tickets, go to www.musicniagara.org or call 1-800-511-7429.

Enjoy the wealth of great music all around us this summer!

July 28th, 2014.