Words and music celebrated
What: Victoria Symphony (Explorations Series): Our Canada When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall Tickets: $20 students $15. Call 250-3866121 or 250-385-6515; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the RMTS Box Office and the Victoria Symphony (Suite 610, 620 View St.) What: Victoria Baroque Players: Bach’s St. John Passion When/where: Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.) Tickets: $28, seniors $25, students and children $5. In person at Munro’s Books, Ivy’s Bookshop and Long & McQuade
The last concert in the Victoria Symphony’s 201617 Explorations Series, on Saturday, will honour Canada’s 150th birthday by celebrating both our literary and our musical heritage. The interesting mixed program was curated by Jack Hodgins, one of Canada’s most distinguished writers, who was born on Vancouver Island and still lives here, in Cadboro Bay.
The musical program, conducted by Tania Miller, includes one première: Cloak of ’Allophenia by Paul Frehner, who lives in London, Ont.
The work was inspired by Frehner’s experience of cultural diversity growing up in Montreal, including his German-born father’s status as an “allophone” (an immigrant to Quebec whose native language is neither French nor English).
Frehner sees his new work as “a musical metaphor for Canada’s embrace of people of many cultures, races, religions and customs,” though the materials and form of the music also reflect our overarching national identity. There is also a “musical nod” to Victoria — a motif derived from the Morse-code spelling of “YYJ.”
The program opens with John Weinzweig’s orchestral suite Our Canada (1943), and includes the recent Sea Glass Music, by Frederick Schipizky, who is a composer of note though also works as an orchestral bassist. (Before joining the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, in 1978, he worked briefly in the Victoria Symphony.)
The latter part of the program is given over to local composer Tobin Stokes, beginning with an aria from his chamber opera Pauline, which was mounted by City Opera Vancouver in 2014 and has a libretto by Margaret Atwood. The opera is about the Ontario writer Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), a.k.a. Tekahionwake, whose mixed Mohawk-English heritage fed into her stories and poems, and her popular staged readings.
The concert will culminate in excerpts from Stokes’s Stories from Klee Wyck, which the Victoria Symphony premièred in 2011 in a special concert exploring Emily Carr’s deep, lifelong connection to the native peoples of the West Coast and the natural world in which they lived. Klee Wyck (Laughing One) was the nickname given to Carr as a girl by natives at Ucluelet, and became the title of her first published story collection, in 1941 — Stokes’s inspiration.
(This repeat performance, which features mezzo-soprano Marion Newman, is a late replacement for a scheduled appearance by Vancouver-based pianist and singer-songwriter Veda Hille.)
Interspersed among these pieces will be readings by B.C. writers, most from the Victoria area, including Patrick Lane, Matt Rader, Rachel Wyatt and Joan MacLeod, who will read from her play Homechild, about the migration of child labourers from Britain to Canada in the 1920s (it premièred at the Belfry in 2007).
The Victoria Baroque Players debuted in April 2011 with a program titled Bach on Palm Sunday, and for more than a year this ensemble devoted itself almost exclusively to Bach.
Its repertoire has broadened very considerably over the years, but it has continued to offer, each spring, some kind of program relevant to the solemn Easter season, usually focused on Bach and other German Baroque composers.
In 2013, the VBP’s Easter program comprised nothing less than Bach’s St. John Passion, a monumental choral-orchestral rendering of the Passion story first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, 1724. That was an impressively ambitious undertaking for a young, small ensemble and, as the first local period-instrument performance of this work, it made for a refreshing take on a staple of the choral repertoire.
Next Tuesday, the VBP will tackle the St. John Passion again, its core ensemble fleshed out with other instruments (oboes, viola da gamba) and joined by its regular partner in cantatas and other choral repertoire, the St. John's Chamber Singers, from the Church of St. John the Divine.
As in 2013, local tenor Benjamin Butterfield, an internationally admired exponent of Baroque repertoire, will sing the central part of the Evangelist, and local baritone Nathan McDonald will appear as Jesus. Seven other vocal soloists — emerging young singers of particular promise — will also perform, including a countertenor, Zachary Windus, and baritone Andrew Erasmus (as Pilate).
The performance will be led by organist and choirmaster David Stratkauskas, who is the music director at St. John the Divine, the VBP’s main venue.