Composer celebrates natural wonders at Cascade Peaks ChamberFest
The festival will include the premiere of Imant Raminsh’s Where Wildness Lives, a choral work dedicated to artistic director Yuel Yawney’s late father
(From left) Borealis String Quartet (Steven Lemay photo), Imant Raminsh
Cascade Peaks ChamberFest takes place at RockRidge Canyon Resort from June 19 to 21
AT THE RISK of understating things, Imant Raminsh has written a lot of music. The Canadian Music Centre has 263 works by the composer in its catalogue, dating back to the early 1970s, and these include violin concertos, orchestral pieces, and the choral works for which he is best known.
All that work has not gone unrecognized. In 2018, Raminsh was made a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2024, he was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. The composer is also an officer in the Order of the Three Stars of the Republic of Latvia, the highest civilian honour in the country of his birth.
Mark Vuorinen
Like most creative people, Raminsh no doubt feels a connection with everything in his catalogue, but his latest composition has a deeper meaning than most. Written for four-part mixed choir and strings or piano, Where Wildness Lives features lyrics by Raminsh’s wife, Becky Strube, and is dedicated to the memory of their long-time friend Marsh Yawney. It was commissioned by Marsh’s son, Yuel Yawney, who is the artistic director of the Cascade Peaks ChamberFest.
“When Becky and I moved here to the Okanagan in the late 1970s, the Yawney family were here, and they were keen amateur musicians,” Raminsh says when Stir reaches him at home in Coldstream. “Marsh was a cellist, Jo was a violist, and their very young son, Yuel—he might have still been in preschool, I’m not sure—was starting on violin. So my wife and I have had a long, long friendship with the Yawneys, so it’s kind of neat that this has transpired into this project.”
Where Wildness Lives will get its premiere during this year’s edition of the festival, which takes place annually at RockRidge Canyon Resort, near Princeton. With Mark Vuorinen at the podium, the Chamber Vocal Ensemble will sing the piece, accompanied by the Borealis String Quartet.
Strube’s lyrics reveal the deep-seated love of nature that the couple share; they will resonate with anyone who has ever trekked deep into the woods, the sacred silence broken only by the creaking of ancient trees and the songs of thrushes and warblers: “Even stillness has its music/throughout nature’s domain/each resonant call a harkening/to seek what can be found.”
“Both Becky and I are keen environmentalists, and we’ve spent time in the mountains, so we found that this was a fitting theme for this specific work, but also we thought that it would help celebrate Marsh’s life as well, because he was a keen outdoorsperson,” Raminsh says. “The fact that Yuel is one of the founding members of the Borealis Quartet, who are in residence there, added another dimension to this.”
This isn’t the first time that having a talented wordsmith close at hand has been a lifesaver of sorts for the composer. In 2002, for example, the two were commissioned to write a theme song for the Fourth International Children’s Conference on the Environment, held in Victoria. And in 2010, the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra celebrated its 50th anniversary by premiering Raminsh’s major choral-orchestral work Quaternity: A Cantata of Seasons, for which Strube provided the libretto.
“There have been a number of times when I’ve been asked to write a piece for a particular occasion and I’ve really struggled to find an appropriate text,” Raminsh says. “In my desperation I’ve asked my wife Becky, who I think is really a very talented poet, if she could come up with a text, so we’ve been able to collaborate on quite a large number of works.
“Finding the appropriate text is often at least 50 percent of the work,” the composer continues. “I’m a very fussy person when it comes to texts. The text needs to be appropriate, obviously, to the circumstances of its first performance, so the context is important, but I’m also aware that some texts are just so perfect in themselves that there’s nothing that I could add to them musically. So to find a text that speaks to me, or that I think I can work with, is not always easy. This is where my collaboration with Becky pays off.”
In addition to the premiere of Where Wildness Lives, Cascade Peaks ChamberFest features three main-stage concerts in the resort’s 350-seat theatre, with repertoire ranging from Mozart and Haydn to contemporary Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. Featured performers include violinist Mark Fewer, violist Sharon Wei, and the Gryphon Trio, comprising violinist Annalee Patipatanakoon, cellist Roman Borys, and pianist Jamie Parker.
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