Early Music Vancouver - Handel's Water Music & Telemann's "Ebb und Flut"

About this event

Join Vancouver’s new Poet Laureate, Fiona T. Lam, EMV’s Artists-in-Residence, and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra in a musical celebration of water. 

The Pacific Baroque Orchestra will perform Handel’s Water Music – a suite of highly spirited dance pieces for a small orchestra. Originally intended for outdoor performance, the work premiered on a barge on the river Thames, where it provided entertainment for a royal cruise hosted by King George I of Great Britain on July 17, 1717. The king was so delighted with the new work that he asked to hear it over and over—for a total of four performances. Telemann’s water music, Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth, celebrated the centennial anniversary of the Hamburg Admiralty in 1723. The suite draws upon Hamburg’s geographical location as an important and successful port on the river Elbe. Telemann illustrates the piece with mythological water deities and tone painting. Alasdair MacLean is a Canadian composer living in Nova Scotia. His piece for five strings, The Silken Water is Weaving and Weaving, was inspired by a line from the poem Cape Breton by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1976).

This stream is available to watch until May 2, 2023.

Artists

Pacific Baroque Orchestra

Alexander Weimann, music director

David Greenberg, violin

David McGuinness, keyboard

Fiona Tinwei Lam, Vancouver poet laureate

Programme

• 1. Concert – approx. 84 min programme

Repertoire

PROLOGUE

1. William Christie (c.1778-1849) 

2. Pearlin Peggie’s Bonny (the Laird of Foveran) / The Kail Reets of Fittie / The Warld’s gane o’er me now

3. MacKinnon’s Brook (traditional Cape Breton strathspey) 

4. Loch Ness (Scottish trad reel from Robert Bremner, A Collection of Scots Reels, c. 1751, CB setting)

5. Cronan na Linne Mhuilich [Cronan of the Sound of Mull] (Scottish trad reel from the Athole Collection, 1884, CB setting)

6. Over the Isles to America (Scottish trad reel from the Skye Collection, 1887, CB setting)

7. At the fishhouses – Elizabeth Bishop (excerpt) (Read by Fiona T. Lam)

8. Alasdair MacLean (b. 1955): The Elizabeth Bishop Suit - 1. The silken water is weaving and weaving

ACT I

9. Lovers on Aran: Seamus Heaney (Read by Fiona T. Lam)

10. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767): Hamburger Ebb und Fluht, TWV 55:C3

ACT II

11. Fiona T. Lam: Lost Stream

12. George Frideric Handel (1685-1759): Water Music, HWV 348

This event was recorded live at The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, Canada.

This event is no longer available