Part of the British Columbia Boys Choir’s 45th anniversary cross-Canada tour will have them singing on Parliament Hill, on Canada Day. Executive director Margot Holmes explains, “everyone participated in writing letters and postcards on our behalf, to make our dream a reality.” Artistic director Tony Araujo says, “it’s a fantastic cultural experience for these young artists to perform Canadian choral music across our own great nation”.
The choir has an illustrious history, and counts, among its many well-known graduands, Fraser Walters, one of the Canadian Tenors. Walters, in fact, sang with the choir recently at the Chan Centre, to great acclaim. This particular tour takes the boys to Montreal, Ottawa of course, Corner Brook, Sydney Mines, Lunenburg, Charlottetown, Wawa, Neepawa, Saskatoon, and Banff, and that is a partial list. Travel is via both air and bus, so there should be some fatigued singers arriving back in Vancouver later in the summer.
The Abbotsford Virtuosi, a string ensemble established in 2000 by conductor and violinist Calvin Dyck, will accompany the choir on this tour. Dyck, along with Choir associate conductor Edette Gagné and Vancouver Island conductor Patricia Plumley, will all be on the tour as well. The programme for this tour is titled “O Canada Our Home—Songs and Stories of Canada”. Who knows; when they raise their voices in harmonic unison in Lunenburg, we might, if we try hard enough, be able to pick them up somehow, way over here on the other coast.
