Music takes over in Powell River

International Choral Kathaumixw and new symphony academy create a coastal cultural capital

Daphne Bramham

Vancouver Sun

July 5, 2004

Two guys are shooting pool and all four TVs are tuned to the sports channel.

Plastic pitchers of beer are passed up and down the table.

The bus driver at the end is an Aussie. He's swapping stories with an Aussie woman next to him. A beefy millworker's son is beside me. On the other side is a guy who sells surplus equipment from the Norske Canada mill. His wife is across the table.

A typical weekend in a typical mill town? Not on your life.

The talk is of music. Classical music and the cultural capitals of the world. There's chatter about an amazing concert heard in Vienna. A great choir in Prague. Someone mentions Salzburg and its famous summer Mozart festival.

There's laughter over a local guy who took his tux with him. Who'd wear a tux even in Vienna?

The Aussie woman is mezzo soprano Sally Anne Russell, who has performed with opera companies in Australia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, the United States and, of course, Powell River.

The Aussie bus driver has lived here long enough to have have retired. He's a former school principal who earned his bus driver's licence so he can volunteer for the biennial International Choral Kathaumixw festivals. He's one of this town's thousands of volunteers.

He's just dropped off a load of kids from a Washington state girls' choir kids who were still singing after their concert that night.

The millworker's son is Sam Marcaccini. He's performed with Victoria's Pacific Opera and teaches voice at the Powell River Academy of Music.

The guy from Norske is Kathaumixw's chairman Jim Donnelly, who claims he nearly dropped young Sam off the Charles Bridge in Prague a few years ago. It seems Sam wasn't always so sophisticated and charming.

Not so long ago, he was a kid with attitude on the verge of wasting a huge talent.

Sandra Donnelly is resting for perhaps one of the few times in the past months. It won't last. She's one of two housing co-ordinators and, in this town of 16,000, they have rustled up families willing to take a total of 600 singers from Europe, Asia and Africa into their homes for the next week and feed them three meals a day.

Oh. She also found billets for some of the 89 young musicians who have spent the past two weeks here at the first-ever international Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific.

Those 89 left over the weekend, but not before the first of the 1,200 singers and 300 others in the entourages began arriving for Kathaumixw, which officially opens with a gala Tuesday night.

The Elim Ai children's choir had pulled in Friday night after travelling 36 hours from Kazakhstan. They arrived with an hour to spare before their performance at Dwight Hall, which sits in the shadow of the mill.

Fortunately, they are young. In fact, some are so young that you have to marvel at the courage of parents who let them go so far away from home to a place that few Canadians can place on a map.

They wore white pants, black velvet jackets and bow ties, and one of their songs was Cole Porter's My Heart Belongs to Daddy. With their Russian accents, it came out charmingly as dead-dee.

"I wonder if that's P. Diddy," Russell whispered to me with her Aussie drawl. P. Diddy, of course, is the rap singer. And while there was no rap music that night, there were Broadway show tunes, folk songs, U2, the Beatles and the Ugandan church choir (minus the dancers, whom Immigration Canada feared might overstay their visas).

But it's not just the visitors who sing. Everybody here seems to sing or play an instrument. Even some who claim not to, eventually 'fess up to singing in a couple of the dozens of choirs in town.

The Powell River Academy of Music has more than 500 students and 20 teachers from all over the world. Just this year, it moved from an old logging bunkhouse to a proper school -- a surplus school that over time will be renovated to include rehearsal studios as well as a dormitory so the international symphony academy can grow and expand.

In this little town, there's a shared dream that was first dreamed by Don James, Kathaumixw's founder, whose dreaming began when he came as a school teacher in the 1970s and started a boys' choir.

That choir grew into Kathaumixw, which is recognized by choral experts as one of the best in the world.

This year, James' dream for the international symphony school became a reality. The inaugural class set the standard for those who follow with a superb concert Saturday night that included Berlioz's challenging Symphony Fantastique.

But James and this community aren't finished dreaming yet. There's still opera and dance to be added before this will be a true cultural hub.

And while it seems odd in a town that was once only known as the site of the largest pulp and paper mill in the world, it all doesn't just seem possible. It feels only natural.

dbramham@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Page Update: October 05, 2004