Weather permitting, film and television composer Erica Procunier was planning to make the drive from Toronto home to Sarnia for this weekend’s performances by the International Symphony Orchestra.
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It’s At the Movies concerts in Port Huron Saturday and Sarnia’s Imperial Theater Sunday, 3 pm, feature arrangements of pieces from Procunier’s Great Lakes Untamed Suite, adapted from her score of a 2022 natural history documentary that aired on TVO and the Smithsonian Channel.
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“It’s so special,” Procunier said about her music being performed by the symphony in her hometown. “I can’t stop smiling.”
Growing up in Sarnia, Procunier would listen closely to music at the movies, and go straight home to her piano to play what she heard.
“I just thought it was so powerful,” she previously told The Observer.
Procunier attended the former St. Christopher secondary school and Western University before settling in Toronto to build a career that includes work that won a Canadian Screen Award in 2022 and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award the year before.
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Several years ago, she was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Film Festival to compose the score for Dam! The Story of Kit the Beaver, a film and live concert for Canada’s 150th birthday. It premiered in Toronto and went on to tour orchestras across the country.
She has written music for several films, television and other media projects, including recently scoring a Thomas and Friends animated series appearing on Netflix, as well as an Emmy-winning Apple TV series, Ghostwriter.
Procunier said she has been talking with Anthony Wing, executive director of the Sarnia-based symphony, for a few years.
“He has been patiently waiting for me to bring him something we could actually do together,” she said. “I thought this project was pretty perfect.”
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Procunier said she adapted the documentary’s soundtrack into an orchestral suite in collaboration with the symphony which will perform pieces alongside selected film clips provided by the film’s producers.
“We talked to Erica during the pandemic about a possible project, but we’ve really lucked out with the Great Lakes Suite, which is not only an original orchestral arrangement but an opportunity to use film with our performance, which we’ll be doing more of going forward,” Wing said.
Procunier wrote the score for the three-part television documentary while living in Sarnia during the pandemic, and able to draw on inspiration during walks to the Lake Huron shoreline.
“The Great Lakes have always been close to my heart, growing up beside them,” Procunier said. But she said she learned much more about the bodies of water from the experience of being involved in the documentary.
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“There’s this side to them I didn’t know existed, and to get to encapsulate that into a musical idea, an emotion, it was really special,” she said.
“I can’t believe this is my job, sometimes. I just thought it was really great to be part of this project.”
She said while Toronto is also on the Great Lakes, its waterfront isn’t as accessible as Sarnia’s, and she has discovered another difference.
Procunier said the Sarnia-area’s nickname, Bluewaterland, is deserved. “I didn’t realize this until moving away,” she said. “The blue water, it’s not everywhere. The lake in Toronto is, like, kind of dark blue-gray looking. It’s not as pretty.”
Procunier said she “escaped Toronto in the COVID pandemic” and was living again, for a time, in her hometown. “I had a house here (in Sarnia) I was renovating” and then “I got engaged so it brought me back to Toronto,” she said.
The documentary can be watched on the TVODocs YouTube Channelmore Procunier digitally released an original series soundtrack available on music streaming services.
While symphony orchestras perform film music more often now, “this does not happen to everyone, left and right,” she said. “It’s like a really special thing.”
Ticket information for Sunday’s 3 pm concert by the International Symphony Orchestra at the Imperial Theater in Sarnia can be found online at www.imperialtheatre.net.
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