Allegro’s Royal Fireworks Festival returns for its 30th Year
Allegro’s Royal Fireworks Concert first exploded onto Riverfront Park’s floating stage 29 years ago. Clearly more than a flash in the pan, the event has grown beyond an evening concert finishing off with fireworks. This year’s Royal Fireworks Festival and Concert begins Sunday afternoon in the park’s Lilac Bowl and includes displays of
18th-century crafts, interactive history exhibits, royal impersonators, juggling and magic acts, a proclamation read by Spokane’s mayor and dancing by Theatre Ballet of Spokane to the music of Vivaldi.
“We’ll even have a live chess match that might include a ‘confrontation’ between the players,” says Allegro co-director David Dutton.
At the end, of course, there will be George Frideric Handel’s “Musick for the Royal Fireworks,” accompanied by the sight and sound of real fireworks.
Allegro’s annual event started in imitation of the 1749 London festivities celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession (well, almost).
Dutton says that Sunday’s orchestra will come close to Handel’s original group of 60 players.
Only wind instruments and percussion were used then and now, with no string instruments, though Handel would have liked to have used them. (He added them to later performances.)
“We will be playing other music than Handel,” Dutton says, listing works by composers from the 16th-century Tylman Susato through Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Beethoven.
“And we’re playing some Mahler to honor some of the important members of the Spokane arts community who died this past year, and Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ for a person still very much alive who we have chosen for her long service to Spokane’s musical community.”
Allegro co-founder and co-director Beverly Biggs will direct some 70 separate fireworks cues from a specially marked musical score to coincide with places in Handel’s music.
When it came to fireworks, the London originals were a disaster.
One wing of the huge structure designed to be illuminated by the fireworks caught fire and was burned to the ground. The weather was bad, and a duel between the fireworks designer and the Master of the King’s Ordnance was barely averted.
Allegro has had better luck.
“Rich Vaughn has done our fireworks beautifully since the beginning,” Dutton says.
“I’m sure we have the only performance anywhere in the world that has the fireworks choreographed to Handel’s music.”
Because of construction activity, there will be no access to the park through the INB Performing Arts Center/Convention Center complex, he said.