Medieval song, romance and drama
On Saturday, the Early Music Society of the Islands will sponsor an intimate concert of 15th-century love songs from the court of the dukes of Burgundy, featuring just two singers with lute accompaniment.
It will be the Canadian debut of a New York-based couple, soprano Sylvia Rhyne and tenorlutenist Eric Redlinger, who have performed internationally since 2001 as the duo Asteria (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$25/$23, student rush $8; earlymusic societyoftheislands.ca).
The program includes the best-known composers of 15th-century France (Binchois, Busnoys, Dufay) alongside lesser figures, among them the ubiquitous and prolific Anonymous.
The performers conduct their own archival research into original sources, particularly each spring when they serve as artists-in-residence at Château de Germolles, in Burgundy.
The aim of Saturday’s concert is to show, through the prism of the Arthurian romance, how the courtly love songs of the medieval troubadours continued to nourish composers centuries later.
To provide a connecting thread for the program, the duo will draw on the popular chivalric story of Sir Yvain, subject of the 12th-century French romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, by Chrétien de Troyes.
There is a dramatic element to Asteria’s concerts, which are semi-staged and performed from memory. Rhyne, indeed, has a professional background in musical theatre, including a Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd and touring productions of The Sound of Music and The Phantom of the Opera.
This weekend is also conspicuously rife with modern music, including three widely varying concerts on Saturday.
One of them, in the new-music series A Place to Listen, sounds irresistibly weird: an appearance by the Nova Scotia-based musician, writer and filmmaker Darcy Spidle, who, under the sobriquet “chik white,” performs on the jaw harp — yes, that twang-twangy thing you hold in your mouth and pluck (7 p.m., James Bay United Church, $10; aplacetolisten.wordpress.com).
Victoria is the last stop on chik white’s tour promoting his new album stranger calls to land, which includes tracks in which his jaw-harp playing is superimposed over sounds he recorded while floating on a “homemade raftcum-instrument” in the Bay of Fundy.
On Saturday, he will première “a new concert-length work for treated cassette tape, jaw harp and electronics that will explore a more intimate and ambient side of his work,” according to the concert’s sponsors, who add, unnecessarily, “this will be a strange and beautiful evening — most likely unlike anything you’ve heard before.”
The same day, the University of Victoria will sponsor a recital by the Trinitas Chamber Ensemble, comprising flutist Michelle Cheramy, cellist Nathan Cook and pianist Phil Roberts (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, by donation; finearts.uvic.ca/ music/calendar). This adventurous trio, founded in 2015, is based in St. John’s, where Cheramy and Cook teach at Memorial University.
The trio’s concert is inspired by concept of the “third stream,” a term coined in the 1950s to describe music that synthesized classical and jazz idioms.
Their program includes arrangements of music by Gershwin and Astor Piazzolla as well as trios by three interesting contemporary composers — two Americans, Norman Dello Joio and Lowell Liebermann, and Nikolai Kapustin, an idiosyncratic Russian in whose trio the jazz influence is often raucously apparent.
Also on Saturday, the Victoria Composers Collective and Oak Bay New Music will launch a concert series showcasing contemporary music from various regions of Canada, with this first installment focusing on composers born or residing in B.C. (7 p.m., St. Mary’s Anglican Church, $20/$15 advance/$10; victoriacomposerscollective.com).
The program is divided between existing works by wellestablished figures (Christopher Butterfield, Rudolf Komorous, Jocelyn Morlock, Sylvia Rickard) and brand-new music by emerging composers from Victoria and Vancouver, including Maria Eduarda Mendes Martins, the Collective’s co-director, who is from Brazil but now lives here and holds a master’s degree from UVic.
Finally, on Sunday, the young Romanian-Canadian guitarist Andrei Burdeti will perform solo in the appropriately intimate recital room of Wentworth Villa, the restored heritage home at 1156 Fort St. (2:30 p.m., $40/$25; wentworthvilla.com).
Burdeti, a recent doctoral graduate of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, will offer an eclectic program drawn mostly from the 20th century and from quite literally all over the map: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Paraguay, Brazil.