Concert-goers spoilt for choice
Weekend events include diverse program performed by Victoria Baroque Players
This Saturday, there will be no fewer than three concerts of note, all, alas, running simultaneously. The University of Victoria’s Faculty Concert Series will feature guitarist Alexander Dunn in a solo recital that will include arrangements of music by Beethoven and sonatas by Ferdinand Rebay and Joaquín Turina (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, $20/$15/$10; finearts.uvic.ca/music/events/).
At Christ Church Cathedral, the CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble will offer a wide-ranging program of Celtic works, many of them composed or arranged by Canadians, some featuring traditional Celtic instruments — harp, penny whistle, accordion, bodhrán, percussion (7:30 p.m., $25/$22/$10, under 13 free; capriccio.ca).
And at the Church of St. John the Divine, the Victoria Baroque Players will expand their reach by incorporating the fortepiano for the first time, in one of their now regular explorations of repertoire from the Classical era (7:30 p.m., $28/$25/$5; victoria-baroque.com). The diverse program is full of intriguing novelties.
The first half brings to light music by three late-18thcentury composers who would have to be better known just to be called obscure: chamber works for mixed woodwindand-string ensembles by an Italian, Giovanni Battista Cirri, and a Bohemian, Joseph Fiala, and a concerto by an Englishman, James Hook, featuring local historical-keyboards expert Michael Jarvis as the fortepiano soloist.
The second half begins with a soprano aria by Mozart arranged as a flute quintet, but the marquee work on the program is its grand finale: Haydn’s Symphony No. 96 (the “Miracle”), one of the 12 symphonies he composed for his two triumphant visits to London in the early 1790s.
This is the fourth season in a row that the VBP has programmed one of Haydn’s “London” Symphonies. As before, they will perform it in “symphony quintetto” form, as arranged for flute and string quartet by Johann Peter Salomon, the German-born violinist and impresario who took Haydn to London and served as his concertmaster there.
Haydn signed over the rights to his “London” Symphonies to Salomon, in exchange for a cut of the profits, and Salomon’s very popular flutequintet arrangements, published beginning in 1798, were among various efforts he made to exploit these works.
Saturday’s performance will include a bassoon to reinforce the bassline and will feature, for the first time, thanks to Jarvis’s presence, the optional piano accompaniment that Salomon provided for his “symphony quintetto” arrangements.
The other faculty concert at UVic this weekend, on Sunday, is an unconventional one: a musicotheatrical piece conceived and performed by pianist Bruce Vogt (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, $20/$15/$10).
The project was inspired by a parlour game, Purgatory Mates, devised by the poet W.H. Auden: Select two writers of antagonistic temperament (Eliot and Whitman, Tolstoy and Wilde) and consign them to a purgatory from which they can graduate only when they have learned to love and respect each other.
Vogt has adapted the game using two composers who do seem to have little in common: Beethoven and Debussy.
Drawing on letters, biographies, other source material and his own imagination, Vogt devised a playlet, about 35 minutes long, that puts the two composers in dialogue, explaining their objections to each other’s music — even parodying each other on the piano — and touching on larger esthetics issues (What is art for? What should art do?) before achieving a rapprochement.
Vogt plays both composers himself, albeit without staging or costumes or funny voices, and introduces and concludes the show in his own voice. The drama is followed by music, two works that feature in the dialogue: Book 2 of Debussy’s Images, and Beethoven’s last sonata, Op. 111.
Vogt conceived the show last July, in response to an invitation to give a lecture-recital as part of a Debussy course he was teaching in the Victoria Conservatory of Music’s summer piano academy. (That version involved Beethoven’s Op. 110 sonata.)
The show was well received, so Vogt subsequently performed it, with revisions, in Surrey and Edmonton and this month, in London, Ont., and Toronto (where his sister and brother-in-law, both professional actors, performed the dialogue).
Sunday’s show will be streamed online (audio only) through UVic’s Listen! Live program (finearts.uvic.ca/music/events/live).