A Royal Blast Royal Fireworks Concert Mixes Classical Sounds With Wild Fireworks
Spokane fireworks lovers may still be experiencing a hunger for more rockets and explosions after a relatively quiet Fourth of July. Allegro, Spokane’s Baroque and Beyond concert producers, plans to fill both the appetite for pyrotechnics and for music with its annual Royal Fireworks Concert at Riverfront Park Sunday night.
“This year’s concert will have twice the amount of fireworks we had last year,” says David Dutton, conductor of the concert. Dutton and harpsichordist Beverly Biggs are the founders and co-directors of Allegro and the Royal Fireworks Concerts.
During the regular concert season, Allegro produces a concert series emphasizing early and unusual music featuring historical instruments. But the organization’s summer fare for the past 18 years has been the Royal Fireworks Concert at Riverfront Park, an event that attracts up to 50,000 people to the steps of the Spokane Opera House and to the Clock Tower Meadow in Riverfront Park.
Dutton will conduct the 62-member Royal Band in a program that includes works by 17th- and 18th-century composers Louis Couperin, Johann Ernst Altenburg and George Frideric Handel along with music from the Lew Wallace silent film classic “Ben Hur” and a new fanfare by Spokane composer William Berry.
The Royal Band is made up of oboes, English horns, bassoons, trumpets, French horns and percussion. “This year’s band will have players from all over the Northwest,” Dutton says. “We even have one musician from Germany who’ll be playing with us while she visits her parents here in Spokane.”
The past seven years of Royal Fireworks Concerts have each featured a fanfare commissioned for the occasion. This year’s fanfare is written by trumpet player, composer, arranger and Spokesman-Review music correspondent William Berry. Berry’s fanfare uses tunes from Johann Ernst Altenburg’s Concerto for Seven Trumpets, another work to be heard at Sunday’s performance.
“My fanfare may sound more like John Williams than Johann Altenburg,” Berry says. “I thought it would be fun to take some of Altenburg’s tunes and bridge the gap between the baroque and an audience more accustomed to movie music.”
Spokane’s Royal Fireworks Concert was inspired by the event produced at the command of King George II in London’s Green Park in 1749. The fireworks display and concert celebrated (a year late) the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle ending the War of Austrian Succession. Handel, English royalty’s favorite composer, wrote music for the occasion. Even though 12,000 people heard a rehearsal of the music at one of London’s pleasure gardens, newspaper reports of the big event itself made no mention of Handel or his music.
Since then, of course, Handel’s “Fireworks Music” has become one of the most famous pieces of 18th-century instrumental music, most often heard with the string parts Handel added later.
In addition to “The Musick for the Royal Fireworks” (to use Handel’s spelling), the band Sunday will also play the composer’s “Airs for the Changing of the Guard at St. James” and parts of his “Water Music.”
“We selected the ‘Water Music,’ ” Dutton says, to honor Rick Scammell, a Spokane banker who died earlier this year. Rick did so much for us and for the arts in Spokane.”
A tradition at the performance is the announcement of Allegro’s annual Bravo Award recognizing an outstanding contributor to the arts in Spokane.
In past years, attendance at the Royal Fireworks Concert has been very large. Plan to arrive early and enjoy an early evening picnic before the music begins at sunset.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: CONCERT The Royal Fireworks Concert will be Sunday at 9 p.m. at the Riverfront Park Floating Stage. Admission is free.