Solstices, a Carnival and ‘musical cribbage’

The work of Montreal-based Gilles Tremblay, who was one of Canada’s most distinguished composers for half a century, has been a mainstay of the Aventa Ensemble, Victoria’s premier newmusic group.

Indeed, Aventa’s debut concert, in 2003, included Tremblay’s Solstices (ou les jours

et les saisons tournent), a sextet from 1971, and over the years, it has performed Tremblay’s music often, locally and on its Canadian and international tours, most recently last year. In 2005, it offered an allTremblay concert here in which the composer himself conducted Solstices — the first time Aventa was led by anyone other than its co-founder and artistic director, Bill Linwood — and its first CD, released in 2007, was devoted entirely to Tremblay’s music, including Solstices.

Tremblay died last summer, at age 84, and on Sunday, Aventa will pay tribute to him with another performance of Solstices (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, $20; pre-concert talk 7:15; aventa.ca). Solstices is a particularly apt candidate for repeat performances, because by its very nature it never sounds the same twice. (The subtitle means “the days and seasons revolve.”)

Aventa will revisit other favourite works on Sunday, including Michael Oesterle’s Tell Tales (2011), which it commissioned and premièred. It is a kind of piano concerto, though without conventional piano-concerto rhetoric. Instead, Oesterle “found a narrative for the piano that, to me, resembles a somewhat reluctant guest at a dinner party.”

The largest portion of the program will comprise excerpts from Die Stücke der Windrose (The Wind Rose Pieces, 1988-94), by Mauricio Kagel, an important and radically original German composer born in Argentina in 1931. This work is a cycle of eight substantial pieces for salon orchestra all inspired by places corresponding to compass points. (A “wind rose” is a circular diagram that displays wind speed and direction at a particular place and time.)

Aventa will perform North and Southwest from this cycle, as it did in 2007, the year before Kagel’s death. Linwood says these movements might be his favourites among all the 20th-century works Aventa has performed — and for this devoted champion of modern repertoire, that says a lot.

Also on Sunday, in its final concert of the season, the Sidney Classical Orchestra will offer an interesting and accessible program conducted by its founder, Stephen Brown (2:30 p.m., St. Elizabeth’s Church, Sidney, $25/$13, under 20 free; sidneyclassicalorchestra.ca).

The highlight of the program will be Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saëns’s popular “grand zoological fantasy” for two pianos and chamber ensemble. The performance will be accompanied by the verses Ogden Nash wrote for this piece decades later, recited by Robert Holliston, who heads the keyboard department at the Victoria Conservatory of Music and is also a popular lecturer.

The pianists will be the regular duo of Susan de Burgh and Ed LeBaron, who performed Carnival of the Animals under Brown in 2016, as part of the VCM’s summer Piano Academy. (All three of them are on the conservatory’s faculty.) The Duo will also join the orchestra in another diverse and entertaining work, Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, from 1932. Poulenc also wrote concertos for one piano, organ and harpsichord, apparently intent on exhausting the full range of keyboard soloists.

Sunday’s concert will open with the première (again featuring Holliston) of a work by Brown himself: Where the Gander Goes Barefoot, a charming five-movement suite based on texts from Mother Goose, for a speaker and the same chamber ensemble as Carnival of the Animals. (It is a revision of a song cycle Brown composed in 1999.)

Next Wednesday, April 18, the newmusic series A Place to Listen will present soprano Cathy Fern Lewis, a champion of experimental music, in concert with pianist Christopher Reiche Boucher (7 p.m., James Bay United Church, $10; aplacetolisten.ca).

According to APTL, Lewis and Boucher will curate a “musical journey” drawing on “a months-long exploration of creativity and play.” Their concert will begin with a work of their own devising, a sort of “musical cribbage” exploring the intersections of music and games — two kinds of “play.”

The program will also include works by Björk, John Oswald, Linda Catlin Smith and Lewis herself, plus “a surprise piano duet.”