After an absence of 8 years, England made a dramatic return to the Benson and Hedges International Fireworks Competition last Saturday night in Montreal.
The music coordinated pyrotechnics were greeted enthusiastically by the thousands of people spectating, producing applause during the display, in contrast to the previous weeks’ entrants when applause was reserved until the end of the performance. Music included works by Elgar and other English composers. The finale was particularly dramatic with a thunderous display performed to Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter”, from the “Planets”. This was a most fitting piece of music, since the winner of the competition will receive the “Gold Jupiter” award.
There were many novel effects, some of which I have seen used before by Lancaster, and other completely new effects. Throughout the whole display much use was made of Roman candles, some launching small shells, then 10-15 4″ shell burst at a medium height followed by a climatic burst of several 8″ shells at great height. Some of the comet stars from the Roman candles had particularly long trails, over 300′ would be a fair estimate by comparison with the towers of the adjacent Jacques Cartier bridge.
One unusual effect was that which seem to be creating the sound of tremendous “applause”. This seemed to be produced from many small yellowish colored stars which “crackled” rather than exploded like salutes. Talking of salutes, there were many instances of what can be best described as “whirling bangs”. These appeared to be stars giving out white sparks in a rotating sort of fashion, terminated by a salute. This gave the effect of “curls” of white sparks followed by many loud reports. This were used both from shells and Roman candles.
Another unusual effect, carried out by the previous weeks’ contestants, but to much better effect by Lancaster, was that of the shaped starbust shell. This typically produced (in the previous cases) a single circle of stars. This week, Lancaster managed to produced two concentric circles of stars, one large and one small. It is quite common to have stars change color several times, eg, from white, to green to red etc. Lancaster took this idea along a new direction by including black as a star color! The effect is difficult to describe but here goes. Half the stars in a shell change from black to silver, whereas the other half change from gold to black. This looks as though there are two separate bursts coming from exactly the same place.
Lancaster also made extensive use of whistles. The sound of several hundred or thousand whistles simultaneously is quite tremendous.
Another unusual effect was one which I have christened the willow tree. This starts out as a normal globular start burst. However, instead of the stars burning out before they start to fall, as is normally the case, the stars last few seconds of burn produced a trail of sparks which appeared to fill the sky with long trailing “leaves”, the whole effect appearing to create a weeping-willow in the sky.
As well as aerial fireworks, there were quite a few large fountains used, no doubt complementing the lakeside firing area. However, my vantage point was such that it was difficult to see what was happening on the ground. It looked as though the fountains were producing sparks up to a height of several tens of feet though.
All in all, it was a fantastic display, with the finale being particularly brilliant.