A Jamesian feat of global size

An isolated mill town's global sound of music is largely due to one teacher's arrival in 1973

Daphne Bramham

Vancouver Sun

Thursday, July 08, 2004

POWELL RIVER -- It's a jarring juxtaposition. Isolated mill town. Cultural capital of Canada.

That said, the town that used to have the bragging rights as home to the largest pulp and paper mill in the world is now undeniably an important cultural hub. Certainly it's worthy of the banners, proclamations and a cheque for $250,000 from Heritage Canada.

For the past 20 years, Powell River has hosted the biennial competition called International Choral Kathaumixw that has grown into one of the top five festivals of its kind in the world.

(Kathaumixw -- pronounced Ka-thou-mew -- is the Salish word for a gathering of people from many different nations.)

The festival may be better known in Europe than in Vancouver largely because artistic director Don James and the organizers decided singers are more important than audiences. And once the choirs are housed, there's quite literally no room left at the inns.

"The audience sleeps in tents and in backyards," James says with a chuckle.

So it was no surprise that, aside from the performers, there were few tuxes and gowns at Tuesday's opening gala. Never mind. As festival chairman Jim Donnelly says, getting dressed up here means wearing clean jeans.

Powell River is a rare town. It seems everybody sings or plays an instrument.

More than 500 take lessons each year at the Powell River Academy of Music where James is artistic director. Others go to the Ecole Cote du Soleil, a 25-year-old French outdoor recreation and cultural school.

The ballet school's enrolment has been as high as 250 in some years.

Meanwhile, down the road at Sliammon, Menathey -- the 21-year-old, great-great-great grandson of the last known shaman on the coast -- is helping reclaim his people's heritage through song and dance.

It's not just that people here are musical in larger numbers than seems possible. (And, yes, at parties locals do sometimes do sing the Logger's Song or even I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay.)

It's that they are worldly and well-travelled. People say that before most kids here turn 20, they've been to Europe or Asia at least four times.

Maybe it's not most of the kids. But because of the festival, almost everybody here has friends around the world.

There was music in Powell River before Don James came -- choral societies, bands and concerts date back to when the mill owner brought the first piano here by boat in 1911.

James dreamed up the festival. He dreamed up the Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific that started this year with some of the world's top young musicians coming here for two weeks of intensive study with some of the world's top players.

He dreams of an opera festival as early as next year.

James arrived in 1973, fresh out of the University of Washington with a degree in orchestral conducting and the intention to stay a year and then get a better job.

The Okanagan native had never heard of Powell River when he took a job teaching music at the high school. But the offer was $1,000 more than any of the others.

There was no orchestra or band program and no money for either. He started a boys' choir.

One year blended into another. Soon his boys' choir was not only touring, but winning at European competitions. Among the charter members was seven-year-old Tobin Stokes. He's now an award-winning, Victoria-based composer.

James was hiking one day with mill executive Dal Matterson right after returning from a choral festival in Llangollen, Wales. Powell River is as beautiful as Llangollen, James said. So if he started a choral festival would Matterson be the chairman?

The electrical engineer had lots experience managing big projects both here and abroad. He agreed immediately.

They decided to do it without government money. They agreed not to go over budget because they and five others put up $5,000 each for the first festival and they wanted it back. (This year's budget for the week-long festival and the provincewide choir tours that follow is $700,000.)

They are fiercely proud of never having gone in the red and never having sought grants -- other than the $250,000 that came with the cultural capital designation.

(While James and Matterson dream and plan, Terry Sabine has been making it all happen with an army of roughly 1,000 volunteers. Sabine is the administrator for the festival and the academy. She's also James's wife.

James insists they must have the best people. How?

"You just ask them and give them a very low fee. You tell them, 'Here's the idea, do you want to be part of it or not?' "

And the best has bred the best; artists have come and stayed. Local kids have been inspired and thrived.

At seven, Stokes was a charter member of James's boys' choir. He's 37 now and has won awards for his movie and theatre work. His latest work, The Perfect Vase, premiered at Tuesday's gala with homegrown baritone Sam Marcaccini singing one of the solos. He sang in the boys' choir, now teaches at the Powell River Academy and has performed with Victoria's Pacific Opera.

Earlier in the evening, Stokes' 12-year-old son, Vaughn, sang another of his compositions, Kathaumixw Anthem.

Laszlo Tamasik choreographed the seventh movement of The Perfect Vase that his ex-wife, Mary, danced along with Powell River native Geraldine Furrer, who left here to join the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and has recently returned.

Laszlo trained at the renowned school in Budapest, danced with the Bolshoi Ballet and Rudolf Nureyev.

He defected while on tour and arrived Dec. 25, 1967 in Montreal penniless and with only a T-shirt. Dressed in a bathing suit and women's tights, he won a spot as a principal dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. Eventually he made his way across the country and 16 years ago the Tamasiks moved here to teach ballet.

Even the organ played at the gala has a Jamesian twist. Pipe organs are expensive and James asked millworker and harpsichord maker Bill Vanderhoeven to help him get a better deal.

Vanderhoeven talked to Dutch master craftsman Gerrit Klop and arranged a barter -- 4,500 board feet of sitka spruce (worth about $7,000) delivered there in exchange for an organ (worth about $25,000).

Vanderhoeven convinced McMillan Bloedel, which owned the mill then, to take the wood there free. Canadian Pacific Airlines agreed to fly the orga back free after Vanderhoeven wrote the president.

Penny-pinching is what keeps the festival alive. It in turn is revitalizing the town. By Matterson's conservative estimate, Kathaumixw alone pumps nearly $3 million into the local economy.

But there's more to the festival than music and money.

Ask Don Matterson the best thing about Kathaumixw and he goes back to 1990.

The world's best children's choir arrived from Kiev. They were dressed in little more than rags. They were sick and undernourished in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The United Church congregation got them new clothes. Others fed them. The tour Kathaumixw volunteers had organized for them after the festival took them to Seattle, where Powell River people had also arranged for all of the children to be checked out at the cancer clinic.

When Matterson went to Kiev a few years later, parents told him that they hadn't recognized their children when they returned.

Some of the children said whenever they got sad, they would sing O Canada and then they would feel better.

Kathaumixw has special significance for Ildiko Hutas as well. She sang at Tuesday's gala. Her second Kathaumixw, when she was 16 and singing with Budapest's renowned Tavasz Choir, changed her life.

Like all members of overseas choirs, she was billeted with one of about 250 families who feed and house nearly 750 overseas singers each year. The family's son worked at the mill with 20-year-old Jack Kelly.

The son introduced Jack and Ildiko. There was an immediate spark, says Jack. Ildiko just smiles.

When Tavasz went on tour after the festival, Jack showed up at every performance around the province.

At Vancouver airport, she still refused him a first kiss. He'd have to wait until he came to Budapest. Two months later he was there. He was there again at Christmas. He constantly wrote her letters -- in English with Hungarian words taken from the dictionary carefully printed over top.

For five years, they stayed in touch. Ildiko kept trying to get a visitor's visa. Fifteen times, the Canadian Embassy refused. Canadian officials told her to marry him if she wanted to go to Powell River. Ildiko refused.

By 1994, Ildiko had the enticing possibility of a solo career. But still there was Jack and, finally, a visitor's visa.

Ildiko spent the summer of 1995 in Powell River, staying with a Hungarian family. "I wanted to see if it was just a childhood thing," she says.

As she left she told Jack, "If you want me, send me a plane ticket."

It arrived two weeks later. Two years later, they returned to Budapest to get married at the basilica.

They have two children now -- Ildiko Jane, five, and Liam, two. Ildiko teaches at the academy, sings in its choir and runs a day care where she teaches preschoolers to sing.

Jack's Hungarian has improved. He was laid off at the mill and two years ago -- just days after Liam was born -- went to Newfoundland for a year to retrain as a licensed practical nurse.

Ildiko wants to move her family to Budapest for a year. She yearns for the opera, concerts and familiar food, plus she has a chance to study with a famous voice teacher there. And that could lead to a solo career.

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So why is Powell River such a cultural hothouse?

"It's one man's vision. Don James," says harpsichord maker Vanderhoeven. "He has an enormous ego. I mean that in a good way. He uses it very wisely. He can get anybody to do anything."

It's the explanation most people here settle on.

And it partly explains why so many people can do more than carry a tune. It explains the festival, the academy and even dreams for the future.

But it doesn't really satisfy the larger question about Canadian culture.

Margaret Atwood has written that Canadian culture is defined by landscape. It grows out of people's relationship to the land and the ways they have learned to survive with so few of us living so far apart in such a large, rugged country.

Menathey or Eric Blaney -- a 21-year-old Sliammon drummer -- echoes that notion when I ask what he'd do to shake off his pre-gala nerves.

"I'm going to sing my heart out down by the river. I need some bush time," Blaney said when I asked what he'd do to prepare for his gala performance.

But for Ildiko Hutas Kelly, who serendipitously found a home here, she says: "It's people who make the culture. And it's freedom."

dbramham@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Page Update: October 05, 2004