What: Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra’s Solstice Spectacular
When: Saturday and Sunday, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Sooke Community Hall, 2037 Shields Rd., on Saturday (note venue change); University of Victoria’s Farquhar Auditorium on Sunday.
Tickets: $18 adults, $15 seniors/students, $5 youth. For Sooke concert: 250-419-3569 or eventbrite.ca. For UVic concert: tickets.uvic.ca or 250-721-8480. See sookephil.ca for all ticket locations.
The first time Norman Nelson played Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, he was a violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra.
“I was wild. I just couldn’t contain myself,” Nelson said from his home in Sooke. “People kept telling me: ‘Steady on, don’t go overboard.’ It’s hard, when you’re playing violin, to imagine you’re outside the music.”
About half a century later, the 83-year-old is tackling the same piece for the first time from the slightly removed position of conductor, but with no less zeal. Nelson will lead the Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra in two concerts this weekend, which culminate in the concerto.
Asked why he hadn’t conducted the piece before, he said the answer was simple:
“It’s very, very difficult,” he said.
But when one of the community-orchestra members brought the score to rehearsal, Nelson could hardly say no.
“There’s no possible reason that a community orchestra would have to stock this piece in their repertoire. They’d usually have a few Beethovens and a few Brahms and that sort of thing. But not this piece,” he said.
“That’s why I’m doing it. I want us to show the world that we’re up there with the best.”
Nelson has led the community orchestra for 19 years. It has grown to about 70 members, from the 17 who started playing together in a basement and surprised themselves and “a few other snotty people,” with their first performance of Beethoven’s first symphony.
The orchestra has outgrown its Victoria venue of Alix Goolden Hall and, for the first time, will perform on its own at the University of Victoria’s 1,228-seat Farquhar Auditorium.
It has also developed programs to foster young musicians, including the Don Chrysler Concerto Competition. The 2012 winner of that competition, Alice Haekyo Lee, is featured as the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, Op. 35.
The 14-year-old is also a former Victoria Symphony young soloist and is studying music in Toronto at the Royal Conservatory of Music.
Haekyo Lee is a bit ahead of where Nelson was at 14, despite his later successes. Nelson, who was born in Dublin, didn’t begin music lessons until he was 10. And he said he was more concerned with cricket than violin in his early teens.
But at 15, he got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London.
“That sort of took care of the rest of my cycle growing up in those communities,” he said.
Nelson got his first position with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at 20 and went on to the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic. He was concertmaster for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra before taking a teaching position with the University of Alberta.
But even in his retirement Nelson doesn’t show any signs of taking a break from music, instead taking pride in the progress of the community orchestra.
“This is a wonderful orchestra for the sense of community. It’s a wonderful sense of belonging,” he said.
“We have to keep growing.”
