Quartet presents late pieces by Janácek, Mozart
What: Emily Carr String Quartet. When/where: Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Church of St. Mary of the Incarnation (4125 Metchosin Rd.); Monday, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.). Tickets: $25, students free. Call 250386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca and eventbrite.ca; in person at Ivy's Bookshop and the RMTS (McPherson) Box Office.
What: Alexandra Pohran Dawkins, oboe When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria). Tickets: $20, seniors $15, students and UVic alumni $10. Call 250-721-8480; online at tickets.uvic.ca; in person at the UVic Ticket Centre.
This season, the Emily Carr String Quartet is performing the two idiosyncratic quartets by Czech composer Leo Janácek.
In November, it performed No. 1, from 1923, which was inspired by The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy’s tragic novella about marital infidelity. On Sunday and Monday, it will perform No. 2, Intimate Letters, which was one of Janácek’s last works: He composed it in January and February of 1928, and died in August.
Janácek’s mature works generally had some kind of programmatic impetus, and in Intimate Letters, as in the first quartet, that impetus was erotic in nature.
In 1917, though 63 years old and married, Janácek fell in love with a married woman named Kamila who was just 26, and their relationship is documented in more than 700 letters he wrote to her (few of hers survive). Whatever the precise nature of their relationship at first, it deepened in the spring of 1927: Janácek openly declared his love, Kamila seemed receptive, and they made the relationship public. He began writing and visiting her more often, anxd that summer they shared their first kiss.
The relationship proved creatively inspiring to Janácek, and its intensification in 1927 was precisely what he celebrated in Intimate Letters, which was composed in just a few weeks. “It is my first composition to spring from directly experienced emotion,” he wrote to Kamila. “Until now I composed only about things remembered, [but] this work, Intimate Letters, was composed in fire. The earlier compositions only in hot ash.”
The second half of the ECSQ’s program explores a completely different musical world, that of Mozart’s autumnal Clarinet Quintet in A Major, from 1789 — one of his late masterpieces, or as “late” as a masterpiece can be coming from a composer who died at age 35.
The ECSQ will be joined by Vancouver-based clarinetist AK Coope, who performs with many ensembles in that city, in standard repertoire but also, frequently, in contemporary music (she is herself a composer). Over here, likewise, she has performed with both the Victoria Symphony and the Aventa Ensemble.
The program will open with some arrangements of folk tunes by Komitas (1869-1935), who was one of the first Armenians to receive an education in the Western classical tradition, while also absorbing the folk and church music of his own people.
(Born Soghomon Soghomonian, in Turkey, he took the name Komitas in 1894, when he was ordained as a priest.)
Komitas’s prolific work as composer, arranger, ethnomusicologist, and choral director made him a hugely influential figure in Armenian music, which he brought to an international audience. Alas, his career and sanity were destroyed during the period of the Armenian Genocide, and from 1919 until his death he lived in a mental hospital in Paris.
Oboist Alexandra Pohran Dawkins is an associate professor in UVic’s School of Music, where she has taught oboe and woodwind chamber music for 30 years. Her retirement is looming, and to mark the milestone, the school will honour her in the next concert of its Faculty Chamber Music Series, on Saturday.
To open the program, Dawkins and seven UVic alumni will come together in Hummel’s Parthia in E-flat Major (1803), a little quasi-symphony for wind octet that she describes as “just plain fun.”
Pohran Dawkins has always been a champion of contemporary music, and not just as a performer: She is a former director of new-music programming at Open Space, has commissioned works from Canadian composers, and teaches contemporary improvisation techniques at UVic.
To acknowledge this side of her work, she will appear in two pieces both written in 1990: Echoes from a Play, for oboe and string quartet, by Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen; and Prayer of St. Francis, a setting of a text by St. Francis of Assisi, for English horn and male chorus, by the late Canadian composer George Bassingthwaigthe.
Also joining the honouree on Saturday will be UVic colleagues including the Lafayette String Quartet, the Chamber Singers (directed by Susan Young) and tenor Benjamin Butterfield, who will perform selections from the Ukrainian Art Song Project as a nod to one side of Pohran Dawkins's heritage.