Once a romantic, always…ah well, maybe not, but Ernst Schneider certainly remembers he was quite in love with the romantic period when he wrote his Romantic Concerto near 30 years ago.

The piece has never been performed, but will open the Okanagan Symphony’s 50th anniversary tour this week, playing in Kelowna Oct. 16, 17 and 18.

It’s a fitting tribute to one of our longest serving, if not entirely homegrown musical influences, who first arrived in Canada as a teenager.

Schneider was raised in a rural German community and has managed to spend his entire career as a musician tucked away in Penticton—though he’s published 30 pieces or more from that orchard haven.

His sister picked the area as she made her overseas venture, largely because it was situated between two lakes in B.C. and looked like it might make for a good life.

Her choice apparently struck a chord as the farming town she found was enough to draw her brother Ernst, then just 18 years old, and the rest of the family followed.

Schneider had been studying music in Germany, and tried a few odd jobs upon landing in Canada, but quickly returned to music. He travelled all the way to Vancouver on a weekly basis to study under composer/teacher Jean Coulthard.

“Vancouver is a very nice city, but I really didn’t like the big city flavour,” said Schneider. “I just knew it wasn’t for me.”

Instead, he wound up delivering a little taste of the Okanagan to Canada’s orchestral community.

His first published work was The Five Moods of Ogopogo, a selection of five teaching pieces which proved very popular with his students, in part for the Ogopogo art on the cover.

Schneider taught for 40 years while composing, and though he’s retired from the teaching component of his career, he still spends plenty of time writing, currently finishing up work on a string orchestration he hopes to see performed in Vancouver early next year.

It can be difficult to find musicians to take the time to perform a work as involved as Romantic Concerto, so when he got the call it would open the Okanagan Symphony’s fall tour, well you might say it was music to his ears.

“It just came out of the blue sky, really,” he told the Capital News this week.

He had given the score to pianist Arnold Draper, another longtime and much-loved veteran musician from the Okanagan. Draper showed the music to OSO director and conductor Rosemary Thomson and the pair decided to give it a try.

“I’m really taken with the piece; I think it’s full of charm and wit,” she said.

Schneider and Thomson met shortly after she assumed her position with the symphony and last year they worked together on another world premier of one of his pieces: Celebration and Reflection. Schneider wrote the score for Penticton’s centennial celebration, at Thomson’s request, to take the listener on a musical journey through the history of the area—much of which he’s witnessed first hand.

This piece is quite different as it was written in the romantic style, rather than the classical, taking the listener through three movements to a lively finish. It’s dedicated to Helen Silvester, the Penticton pianist he studied under after Coulthard, and though the symphony had yet to run it through when she spoke to the Capital News, Thomson said she loves its whimsical, ethereal feel.

She’s had to scale back some of the other choices she originally made for the program, due to the recent provincial funding cuts, but says the orchestra will perform its full season nonetheless—just with fewer musical guests.

While she loves doing the classics, and has followed Schneider’s work with Tchaikovsky’s robust Symphony No. 5, Thomson said there is nothing quite like bringing a world premier to the stage—particularly when the composer can sit in on the rehearsals and give his views.

For ticket information call Ticketmaster at 250-860-1470 in Kelowna. The concert runs Oct. 16, 8 pm. at Kelowna Community Theatre.

The Okanagan Symphony also performs the program at the Cleland Theatre in Penticton Oct. 17 at 7:30 p.m., call 250-770-1470; and at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre, Oct. 18, 7 p.m., call 250-549-7469.