Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus
Nicholas Fairbank, Conductor
BRITTEN Welcome Ode | View Text
FAIRBANK Éileamh na Talún (première) | View Text
COPLAND Ching-a-ring Chaw; I Bought Me a Cat
FAIRBANK Earth Cantata (première) | View Text
Guest children’s choir: Poirier Elementary School choir, Sandra Arts, Director
Soloist: Rebekah Janzen
Irish flute: Lana Betts & Lanny Pollet
Fiddle: Kate Rhodes
One concert, two premières, and a retirement celebration
On the afternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, at the Community Hall in Sooke, Victoria musician Nicholas Fairbank will conduct his last concert as Chorus Director of the Sooke Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra. On the programme will be two premières composed by Fairbank: his Earth Cantata composed in 2024, and a shorter work sung in the Irish language for choir, traditional fiddle and two Irish flutes entitled Éileamh na Talún, which in English means The Plea of the Land.
Joining the Sooke choir and orchestra for this concert will be the École Poirier Choir directed by Sandra Arts, Rebekah Janzen, mezzo-soprano, fiddler Kate Rhodes, and Lana Betts and Lanny Pollet playing Irish flutes.
Also on the programme is music by Benjamin Britten (his Welcome Ode) and Aaron Copland (Two American Songs). Britten’s Welcome Ode was composed for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, and uses joyous English texts about spring and celebratory dancing. Copland wrote his arrangements of traditional American songs “Ching-a-ring Chaw” and “I Bought Me a Cat” in 1954, and the imaginative orchestral arrangements augment their lively and entertaining quality. The children’s choir will be joining the Sooke Phil Chorus in these two short pieces.
Fairbank’s Éileamh na Talún was written in April of 2025 while in residence at University College Dublin, Ireland, where he developed the piece in collaboration with the poet Eoin Mc Evoy who is on the faculty of UCD. Divided into three parts, the work uses characters from ancient Irish mythology to speak of our need to care for Earth.
The major work on the concert programme is Fairbank’s 2024 œuvre Earth Cantata, a 35-minute work in 7 movements. This piece, too, is about the environment, a theme that the composer has been focusing on in recent years. Using texts by a variety of authors, the piece takes us from a celebration of how the Earth used to be before we began to disregard the care required to maintain it. In the 4th movement, “Extinction,” the text, which speaks of the fate of the now extinct Japanese River Otter, is by Canadian poet Susan Glickman. The 6th movement “Berceuse” is based on a French text by francophone indigenous author Natasha Kanapé Fontaine - a lullaby for Earth. In the final movement “Hope” the music returns to an up-lifting and rousing finish as we look ahead to a hopeful future in which we once again take care of our fragile planet.