The brass bellowed, the strings hummed and the woodwinds whistled the Victoria Symphony Splash into its third decade Sunday night as an event equal parts refined classical repertoire and central community gathering.
Tens of thousands attended as the causeways brimmed with chairs, blankets and even tents, while the streets were bustling even as Heart of Oak set the program on its nautical notes.
Lawn chairs lined the upper causeway five rows deep and spilled out onto Belleville Street. The legislature and Empress Hotel lawns were covered in onlookers and dozens of canoes rafted together in front of the floating stage.
The canvas-seat chairs started unfolding with the dawn despite a rule delaying claim-staking until 8 a.m.
Cindy Greenway was among the first to grab a coveted lower causeway spot, though she wouldn’t admit on the record just how early she had to get there.
“Some people started coming around 6 a.m., and more around 7 a.m.,” Greenway said. “It was dark.”
Through the day, the causeway homesteads became spots to read a book, flip through the newspaper or tackle neighbours in a 10th annual bridge tournament, like Anni and Jake Jakubowski and Ingrid and Heinz Urzinger from Saanichton.
“We like traditional things,” said Jake Jakubowski. “We enjoy the symphony, and it’s a beautiful way to spend the day with neighbours and watch people and see all the events.”
In the sky, early clouds gave way to a clearer evening.
The sun glimmered orange on the water, where Dale Hodgins reclined in the tandem kayak he bought two weeks ago. He paddled the craft from the angler’s club near Ogden Point to meet his daughter, Jasmine, 15.
“It’s front-row seats without having to guard our chairs,” he said of his pillow-lined cockpit. “This is as comfortable as Archie Bunker’s chair.”
Around the harbour, on a slightly larger vessel – HMCS Edmonton – a white tent lent shade to a VIP party on the ship’s foc’sle.
The Edmonton and HMCS Nanaimo had been open to public tours during the day. As the symphony’s horns began to warm up across the water, the ships took on the role of host for event sponsors and navy brass who came out for the concert dedicated, this year, to the Canadian Navy’s centennial.
“It was a great fit for the Canadian Naval centennial,” Commander Tony deRosenroll said.
DeRosenroll was born in Victoria to a naval officer, chose that life for himself and now co-ordinates the centennial celebrations on this coast.
“To have it all gravitate back here to the city of my youth. … I’m frightfully chuffed to be a part of it,” he said, laughing at himself.
Below the columns of the Royal London Wax Museum, Naval Cadet Spencer Sigouin put the next generation of sailors, cadets from HMCS Quadra, through their paces on a pair of 19th century guns that would sound the blasts in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the closing number.
The two crews of four practised loading 50 calibre brass shells into the rifled guns pointed, by coincidence, toward the Nanaimo’s bow.
Mercifully downwind from the young cadets, waffles cooked on an iron. The smell drifted down the lower causeway where some in the seated crowd seemed rapt by 16-year-old pianist, Grace Ma, as she plucked the ivories in Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto while 10 metres above and behind them, the street continued to bustle.
Kids played tag between the gap in a sandwich board, adults found coffee to keep warm as the sun sank and an enormous Newfoundland dog made friends with a black pooch about the size of his paw, and Glière’s Russian Sailor’s Dance pranced about the scene.
Sitting on a corner in front of the legislature, Jan Bouillard of Belgium flagged down Fuji Eng, one of the volunteers collecting donations.
“I think it’s worthwhile to donate such a little donation for such a big project,” he said of his $5 donation.
Bouillard first stumbled across the concert in six years and wanted to get back ever since.
“This kind of concert, I have never seen anywhere else.”
ishelton@tc.canwest.com
– With files from David Karp
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