Concert of substance, plus Requiem for remembrance

What: Lafayette String Quartet When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria) Tickets: $25, seniors $20, students and alumni $10. Call 250-721-8480; online at tickets.uvic.ca; in person at the UVic Ticket Centre What: Fauré’s Requiem When/where: Sunday, 4:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral Tickets: Admission by donation

Last season, the Lafayette String Quartet celebrated its 30th anniversary, and its programming culminated in early February in an ambitious cycle of Shostakovich’s 15 quartets, spread over just one week at the University of Victoria’s School of Music, where the four women have been artists-in-residence since 1991.

Having scaled this Everest of the repertoire with triumphant success, the LSQ has returned to more conventional programming, though it is hardly slacking off. On Saturday, in UVic’s Faculty Concert Series, it will offer three substantial quartets, including a reprise of Shostakovich’s fascinating and challenging Twelfth Quartet, from 1968.

The Twelfth was completed when Shostakovich was 61 and had been in declining health for a decade. (He died in 1975.) Like most of his later quartets, it is profoundly personal, esoteric and experimental. It is one of several late works reflecting his interest in 12-tone music, of which the Soviet regime officially disapproved, though he never really employs 12-tone rows as such; rather, he uses melodies comprising all 12 notes of the chromatic scale (the cello plays one in the opening bars) within a tonal context. Though almost half an hour long (Shostakovich called it “a symphony”), the Twelfth has only two movements, including a long, episodic finale of which the LSQ gave a commanding account in February.

Bracketing the Shostakovich will be Schubert’s charming String Quartet No. 10, written in 1813 when he was just 16, and Beethoven’s Op. 127.

The latter inaugurated Beethoven’s great series of five late string quartets, composed between 1824 and 1826 and representing his last major body of work. (He died in 1827.) These idiosyncratic, highly advanced quartets are distinct in many ways from his other late works, so much so that they can be said to constitute a separate period in his creative output. We still struggle to understand them today.

Op. 127, completed in 1825, is, in some ways, the most normal-looking of the late quartets, with four movements following an outwardly conventional sequence, though little is conventional about the form and content of these movements: Beethoven reimagines Classical forms and procedures in extraordinary ways, and even undertakes experiments in instrumental colour that one would think impossible from a composer who was almost completely deaf.

(Saturday’s concert will be streamed online through UVic’s Listen! Live program: finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar/listen.)

This year, Reformation Day, the Protestant holiday on Oct. 31, had special resonance: It marked the 500th anniversary of the day Martin Luther, according to tradition, nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, sparking the Protestant Reformation.

At Christ Church Cathedral, that milestone was celebrated last Sunday with a day-long series of events that involved music and included the first high-profile public appearances of the cathedral’s new music director, Donald Hunt, a Halifax native who spent a decade in the U.K. before taking over at Christ Church in July.

There will be another special musical event this Sunday, the nearest Sunday to All Souls Day (Nov. 2): a Choral Evensong service in which Hunt will make his local debut as a conductor, in Fauré’s Requiem (4:30 p.m.). Hunt will lead the cathedral’s choirs, the Victoria Children’s Choir, baritone soloist Xu Zhang (a UVic student) and organist Sandra Fletcher.

This will be a “devotional performance” of the Requiem. None of the usual Evensong liturgy will be used; instead, in keeping with the solemn occasion, the movements of the Requiem will be interspersed with prayers for the dead and the recitation of names of the recently departed.

Fauré’s Requiem is apt for such an occasion. The music is serene, meditative, luminous, not dark or dramatic; conspicuously absent, for instance, is the fire and brimstone of the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) portion of the traditional Catholic Mass for the Dead. As such, it is music singularly appropriate to an atmosphere of quiet, dignified remembrance.

Indeed, Fauré’s Requiem, which is programmed here with some frequency, is often given on or around Remembrance Day, which is a little over a week away. In just the past few years, for instance, it has been given in honour of Remembrance Day by three very different local choirs.