La Rêveuse are masters of Baroque
Last week, I noted that the 250th anniversary of Telemann’s death was eagerly celebrated here in 2017, and that the celebrating actually began already in the fall of 2016 and has spilled into 2018. There is more to come this Saturday, when the French ensemble La Rêveuse will appear under the auspices of the Early Music Society of the Islands (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$25/$23; pre-concert talk 7:10; earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca).
This could be the most memorable of the local Telemann celebrations, given this internationally admired ensemble’s mastery of Baroque idioms. La Rêveuse made its Victoria debut in 2012, collaborating with American tenor Jeffrey Thompson in a program of French Baroque music that I later described as “perhaps the most moving early-music concert I have ever attended.” La Rêveuse and Thompson returned to town in 2015, in a program of English music.
On Saturday, the ensemble will comprise five instrumentalists, playing flute, violin, bass viol, theorbo and harpsichord. Save for one concerto by Handel, their program is given over to Telemann, including two of his innovative works for three melodic parts, plus basso continuo. These “quartets” (as he called them), with their imaginative scoring and intricate textures, are among the most colourful and delectable chamber music of the Baroque era, especially the Nouveaux quatuors en six suites (known as the Paris Quartets), which were published in 1738 and purchased by, among many others, J. S. Bach.
The Victoria Baroque Players have been devoted champions of Telemann’s instrumental and vocal music over the years, though Bach has always been the core of their repertoire, particularly in programs marking religious holidays. Indeed, the VBP made its debut, in 2011, with an all-Bach program on Palm Sunday, and it has given a Bach-heavy Easter-themed concert almost every year since.
Next Wednesday, joined by the St. John’s Chamber Singers and a handful of vocal soloists, the ensemble will again pay homage to Passiontide, with a program that includes Bach’s big early cantata Himmelskönig, sei willkommen, BWV 182, which he wrote in 1714 especially for Palm Sunday (7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine, $28/$25/$5; victoria-baroque.com).
The other big work on the program is Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, composed in 1736, the year of his death at the ridiculous age of 26. Though stylistically controversial in its day, and not published until 1749, the Stabat Mater became the most frequently printed work of the 18th century, and it remains one of the greatest hits of the Baroque choral repertoire. In 2012, the Victoria Baroque Players performed both Pergolesi’s original and Bach’s adaptation of the work from the 1740s.
The program will also include a Good Friday motet by Jacobus Handl, a late-16th-century Slovenian composer, and a wee bit more Telemann: an aria from one of his cantatas.
On Sunday, Wentworth Villa, the restored heritage house and architectural museum at 1156 Fort St., will host a recital by the Vancouverbased duo of violinist Joan Blackman and pianist Jane Hayes (2:30 p.m., $40/$25; wentworthvilla.com).
Both performers are well known, in Vancouver and elsewhere, as concert and recording artists. Blackman, formerly a longtime member of the Vancouver Symphony, is the artistic director of Vetta Chamber Music, while Hayes, who has taught in the music department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in Langley, since 1993, is a founding member of the Turning Point Ensemble, the Yarilo Ensemble and the clarinet-piano duo Sea and Sky.
Sunday’s diverse program spans more than 150 years and samples a wide range of idioms; it is also well suited to the intimate venue, which seats only about 85.
The first half of the program comprises one of the set of six violin sonatas that Mozart published in Paris in 1778, plus Schumann’s late Violin Sonata No. 1, from 1851. The second half is devoted to early-20th-century fare: Stravinsky's delightful Suite italienne, a set of violin-piano arrangements of movements from his ballet Pulcinella; Ravel’s last work of chamber music, the Violin Sonata No. 2, the middle movement of which is titled Blues; and three songs from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess as arranged by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz.