Daniel Lapp now holds the record for the largest audience to ever watch a Prince George musician. He was front and centre for the live audience of more than 60,000 in B.C. Place for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games opening ceremonies, plus the 23 million who watched on TV in Canada, plus the hundreds of millions who watched on NBC in the United States and various stations around the globe. It was the largest audience for a Canadian broadcast in our nation's history.
Lapp was unmistakable. He was one of the featured fiddlers (Ashley MacIsaac also among them) during the kitchen party section of the three-hour showcase, his wild blonde mohawk straight up in the air like his music style.
"I couldn't think about the TV part of it," he told The Citizen afterwards. "It was enough just to go out in front of 63,000 people in the stadium. I was under the floor. That's where all the props were stored and a lot of the artists waited, and it was quite thrilling, they opened this hatch and this hydraulic lift picked me up 18 feet onto the stage. It was a thrill. Really great. And fun to hang out with my peers from across the country. I knew half of them, but we had a week to hang out and get to know a lot of others."
This was not his only duties during the games. He was also one of the main musical influences on the medal presentation ceremonies on Monday night. He led a group of up-and-coming fiddlers in a feature segment at B.C. Place Stadium that night. One of them was Prince George's Sydney Wilson, 16.
"Now these kids are having a mini-version of what I experienced with my peers a few nights earlier," he said. "It is something that we will remember for the rest of our lives, and always connect us."
He said there was definitely awareness in the building that one of the flame pillars failed to rise on cue for the lighting of the Olympic flame inside the stadium, but it didn't dampen anybody's enthusiasm among those involved in the show.
"What we witnessed - that team of producers and choreographers, and the volunteers, all performing their parts to make that show happen, it was a miracle," he said. "That one glitch at the end was one small part of the million details that came together. Thousands of people from performers to electricians and engineers and amateurs and professionals all had to come together. We were just up there playing our fiddles. We can handle that. We saw all that awesomeness around us, but we just had to show up on time, stay in tune, and have fun. We could handle that. I don't think anyone was nervous, everyone was very excited."
Lapp has been a busy musician in the lead-up to the games. He was a special guest of Barney Bentall and the Grand Cariboo Oprey during the torch celebration held in Whistler last week, and he was the man in charge of the torch ceremonies in Victoria, the city he calls home (he lives now on nearby Pender Island).
"That was quite an epic thing, I've never done anything like that before," he said. "I co-wrote a song and I conducted the 13-member orchestra and the 50-voice choir, and 20 violin kids from the BC Fiddle Orchestra, and a house band full of Vicoria's darlings: Marc Atckinson, Adonis Puentes, Hugh Fraser, and Dave Flellow was also there. He's also a P.G. boy who was my trumpet hero growing up. He was a few years older than me at PGSS and I was at Duchess (Park secondary school) and he's a band teacher in Victoria now. He's one of the great P.G. musicians, a fantastic trumpet player.
"We also had 60 FN drummers and 300 dancers - all on the field out in front of the Legislature. That was quite an undertaking, my first Olympic thing. And now its amazing, I'm getting all these calls."
Where it spins off, he doesn't know, but he and his wife don't make New Year's resolutions each year, they chose personal words for the year. Lapp's choice was "commitment", and he is using it as a motivator for one of the busiest performance years of his career. So far, he's on pace for a personal Olympic record.
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