Baroque players offer program of grandeur
On Friday, the Victoria Baroque Players will offer a program of unusual grandeur, featuring up to 19 performers, including a large complement of woodwind and brass players, in brilliant and colourful repertoire from the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
The program was motivated by the presence of a guest performer: Simon Munday, an acclaimed British trumpeter with a conspicuously diverse career. Munday is a rarity: a virtuoso on both the modern trumpet and the natural (valveless) trumpet used in early music. He has worked, as member or soloist, with many of the world’s most renowned period-instrument ensembles. But he is also principal trumpet of the National Symphony Orchestra, a member of the quintet Alberti Brass and a busy freelancer who has played with many orchestras and chamber ensembles, has worked in theatre, television and movies, and has toured and recorded with singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel. He also teaches at the University of London.
On Friday, Munday will be the soloist in concertos by Telemann and Johann Friedrich Fasch, and will participate in a big orchestral concerto by Fasch, a chamber sonata by Heinrich Biber and the concert’s grand finale: Handel’s Water Music Suites Nos. 2 and 3. The program will also include a concerto for flute and oboe by Johann David Heinichen and the instrumental suite from Purcell’s gorgeous late semi-opera The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The program will be repeated in Duncan on Saturday evening. Details: victoria-baroque.com.) Each spring since 2015, at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, mezzo-soprano Kathryn Whitney has directed an intensive art-song program — unique in Canada — aimed at older, mostly amateur singers and pianists who seek to improve their skills.
While the first three programs focused on song cycles in German by Schubert and Schumann, this year’s instalment is devoted to English songs.
Whitney, who grew up here and first trained at the VCM, has careers as both a singer and a scholar (she holds a doctorate from Oxford), and her art-song program was one of many experimental, cross-disciplinary ventures to grow out of her recent song-performance research. She currently divides her time between teaching at the VCM and co-directing the SongArt Performance Research Group, at the University of London.
Once again this year, Whitney is collaborating with pianist Anna Cal, a VCM colleague.
The current program focuses on Ralph Vaughan Williams, the greatest and most influential English composer of his generation, and a prolific song composer: His earliest original song dates from 1894, when he was still a college student; his last was written in 1958, the year of his death.
The repertoire of the Vaughan Williams Project comprises a few of his many folk songs as well as three cycles: The House of Life (1903), settings of six sonnets written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his wife; Songs of Travel (190104), settings of nine poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, and ranked among the greatest English song cycles; and Four Poems by Fredegond Shove, from the early 1920s. (Shove was Vaughan Williams’s niece.)
Song nerds, Whitney says, will appreciate the connections between some of these songs and those featured in her earlier Schubert and Schumann projects.
This year’s class comprises 10 singers and five pianists, who range in age from 30 to about 75 and come from a wide range of backgrounds, including teachers and professors, a chemist, a lawyer, a librarian, a computer programmer, the director of a care home and former music students who went on to other careers.
Since mid-March, they have met on weekend afternoons for masterclasses, private and duo coaching and workshops dealing with English art song, Vaughan Williams and practical performance matters.
As usual, the project will culminate in public performances, in the VCM’s intimate Wood Hall. The songs will be performed by the students in two concerts this weekend (two to four songs per student), then Whitney and Cal will perform them next Friday, May 25. They have opened their rehearsals to their students, and Whitney has referred to her artsong projects as “reflective performance” ventures “in which professionals both learn and teach at the same time.”