Brother and sister will join the PGSO to play some old-time fiddle music Saturday at Vanier Hall along with many other fiddlers.
Daniel Lapp will be accompanied by sister Beverley Eggen as the Prince George Symphony Orchestra presents Daniel Lapp & Friends: A Celebration of Prince George Fiddling.
Looking to welcome new audiences into the Prince George Symphony’s world, Maestro Michael Hall, the music director at PGSO, offers a celebration of local fiddle music that sees a dozen BC Fiddlers and folk musicians performing during the event.
“We are continuing to celebrate our 50th anniversary – it was three years ago – but we don’t care,” Hall said about the local symphony. “COVID is not going to ruin our party.”
The idea for the celebration was to bring back musicians that have a strong connection in the community.
“And Daniel is a great artist who has been here, grown up here,” Hall said.
“This is really exciting for us as a symphony orchestra to maybe welcome folks who may not go to the symphony orchestra very much or maybe at all, so people can come out to see Daniel Lapp and then we’ll play some pieces that are not fiddle music but pieces that are upbeat and are really exciting but maybe not our classical pieces. What an opportunity to have folks that maybe we haven’t seen before to come and listen to what we do as well. For me that’s the exciting part of the experience.”
A big part of Lapp’s work for the last 30 years has been to collect original BC fiddle music, he said.
“Prince George turned out to be the greatest resource of these original tunes of any community in the province,” Lapp said. “I think it’s because Prince George was in a logging industry boom in the 50s and people moved here from across the country and they brought their tunes with them.”
In the 1950s and 60s, there were jam sessions at people’s house parties all over town where lots of music was recorded, he added. It often happened that in the middle of the kitchen table the cassette player was plunked down and somebody would hit record.
“So I have an amazing collection of cassette tapes,” Lapp said.
“The Old Time Fiddlers Association, founded here in 1969, had a lot of fiddlers who wrote tunes,” Lapp said. “Some of those tunes have been recorded by fiddlers all over the world.”
As part of the Tuesday morning press conference at Studio 2880 to announce the concert, Lapp, on fiddle, and sister Eggen, on accordion, were on hand to delight members of the media with a performance of Out The Buckhorn Way as a prime example of one of those toe-tapping, foot-stomping, rousing tunes for which Prince George fiddlers are best known.
The song will be part of an eight-song medley of Prince George compositions that Lapp and Eggen will perform at the Saturday night concert.
During the concert, Lapp will also play some jazz on his trumpet as that was his passion as a Prince George teenager.
“I look forward to playing on the Vanier Hall stage that I have done so many times as a kid,” Lapp said. “I will be playing the same horn I got in Grade 10.”
For the Saturday concert, the variety of fiddle music includes Celtic, Quebecois, Irish, Scottish, and Prince Georgian, which offers something special for Lapp and sister Eggen.
“There are fiddle tunes I don’t play with anyone else but Bev,” Lapp said. And it’s been years since they’ve had the opportunity.
“Bev has been keen to learn the BC fiddle tunes and when I’m working as a musician it’s often an Irish repertoire or Bluegrass repertoire, and so there’s only a couple people in the province that I’ve been able to really teach a lot of the BC tunes to and because Bev has always been really keen it’s been over 20 years that we’ve been learning the BC Tunes together.”
It's important to Bev to carry on the legacy of a music-filled life from their parents, Charlotte and Clarence, so this opportunity to perform with brother Daniel means a lot to her.
“I’m lucky Daniel asked me,” Bev smiled.
“I’m lucky, too,” Daniel smiled back.
Tickets for the show are available at www.pgso.com.
