Bicentennial to end on ‘high note’
Free BPO concert features music linked to Niagara County history
SANBORN — Niagara County’s yearlong bicentennial celebrations started off with a blast of color last summer at Niagara County Community College with its hot-air “Balloons Over Niagara” program.
The celebrations will end there Tuesday in a riot of sound, thanks to a free concert by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the school’s Fine Arts Auditorium.
The 90-minute concert will start at 7 p. m.
Seventy-eight members of the BPO will play compositions that are related in some way to Niagara County’s history, including the famous first movement from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.
“The 5th is included because it was composed in 1808, the same year Niagara County was established,” said Wendy Roberson, co-chairwoman of the county’s Bicentennial Commission.
Roberson said the rest of the pieces are much more directly tied in to county history, such as American composer Ferde Grofe’s “Power of Niagara,” which was composed in 1961 in celebration of the opening of the
Niagara Power Project. Grofe, composer of the famous “Grand Canyon Suite,” was guest conductor for the BPO when “Power of Niagara” was first performed in the Taps Gallagher Center gym at Niagara University in 1962.
To add to the local flavor, she said, Barker’s Paul K. Ferington, a retired NCCC music professor and administrator over 32 years, will serve as guest conductor for the BPO.
A member of the BPO’s board of trustees for 24 years, Ferington said he has directed the orchestra on about 400 occasions as an unpaid volunteer.
Ferington, now professor emeritus at NCCC, said it will be the sixth time the BPO has performed at the college since the college opened its Saunders Settlement Road campus in 1973.
The program, titled “Ending on a High Note,” is open to the public and free of charge, Ferington said.
Ferington said he was asked to conduct the concert and come up with a musical program that would reflect the county’s history.
“I did the research and put a program together that contains all works that have some relationship to Niagara County mostly from the standpoint that the composers visited Niagara County, Niagara Falls and Lockport and completed the pieces when they were in Niagara Falls, that type of thing,” Ferington said. “So there’s a direct historic tie-in, something of historic relevance to Niagara County.
“The most interesting piece from that perspective is Grofe’s ‘Power of Niagara,’ a composition that was commissioned in 1961 by the New York Power Authority.”
When it premiered in 1962, the authority held a reception at the Niagara Power Project.
“Some of the musicians that were present told me it was the only reception they had been to where there were flowing fountains of Manhattans and Martinis,” Ferington said.
“The Grofe piece is not only interesting because of its direct relevance to Niagara County, he added, “but also because of the sound effects that it contains and that we will try to incorporate in our performance.
“It really captures the construction, the technology, the turbines. This is no donkeys-on-the- trail stuff. This is a pretty bombastic piece with a couple of relatively quiet sections that provide for a nice breather. But for the most part there is the sound of hammers banging, construction horns and sirens and other sounds that characterize a construction scene.”
In its musical salute to the county, Ferington said, the BPO also will do selections from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” from Antonin Dvorak, Peter Doyle’s “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and John Philip Sousa’s “Invincible Eagle March.”
Roberson said all three works were influenced by the grandeur of Niagara or finished during visits to the area.
For example, Sousa composed his piece for his 1901 visit to the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo, during which “he arranged a train to carry his band to Lockport so they could see the Flight of Five locks to the Erie Canal,” Roberson said.
“Tchaikovsky finished his ‘Nutcracker’ ballet “while inspired by a visit to Niagara Falls,” she added.
In addition, she said, concertgoers will be entertained by the sights and sounds of a bygone era as replicated by the costumed Old Fort Niagara Regimental Field Music fyfe and drum corps.
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