The Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra began in 1930 as the Junior Symphony. Today there are four orchestra divisions comprised of students from the beginning string musician to those in advanced university studies. The Senior Orchestra is under the baton of Arthur Polson, internationally renowned Canadian composer, violinist and conductor.

Composer Glen Morley, a lifeleong railway buff, spent his schoolboy years in the South Okanagan Valley when it was « Railway Country ». Coquihalla Legends evokes in music a composite picture of the stupendous mountain scenery, the dedicated track workers, and the inevitable tragedy of a runaway crashing down a mountainside. A « ghost train » emerges from a pile of tangled wreckage and whistles eerily as it proceeds toward the railroaders’ Valhalla.

Jupiter Train (Victor Davies) is a short suite written as a film score. It is the year 2020 on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. The moon is racked with explosions. All life is endangered. For the beautiful Yarothra, a native of Jupiter and Yular, her true love from the planet Saturn, there is only one escape – The Jupiter Train.

If Eldon Rathburn’s first love is music, his second has to be railroads! The six preludes, originally written for piano, are colourful vignettes of train travel around the world.

HECTOR VILLA LOBOS

1. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2

(4th movement: The little train of the Interior)

GLEN MORLEY

2. Coquihalla Legends

VICTOR DAVIES

3. Jupiter Train

ELDON RATHBURN

4-9. Six Railroad Preludes

GEORGE GERSHWIN

10. Rhapsody in Blue

JOHANN STRAUSS, JR.

11. Vergnügungszug – Pleasure Train