Six cello suites by Bach at Christ Church

What: Pacific Baroque Series: Bach's Cello Suites, with Beiliang Zhu. When/where: Thursday and Friday, 7:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral. Tickets: $40, students $25; two-concert pass $70/$45. Call 250-386-5311; online at ticketfly.com; in person at Ivy's Bookshop, Munro's Books, the cathedral Office (930 Burdett Ave.) and the Victoria Conservatory of Music (900 Johnson St.).

What: Lafayette String Quartet, with Yariv Aloni, viola. When/where: Friday, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, Maclaurin Building, University of Victoria); live online at livestream.com/somlive. Tickets: $25, seniors $20, students and alumni $10. Call 250-721-8480; online at tickets.uvic.ca; in person at the UVic Ticket Centre.

Bach clearly relished the challenge to his technique and imagination posed by his six cello suites, in which he sought to explore a huge range of textures and dance types through the limited resources of a single unaccompanied string instrument.

This sounds like the definition of esoteric repertoire, yet the cello suites are among Bach's most enduringly popular works, and for cellists they are something like the Old Testament. As one Bach scholar put it: “The six suites are today in the repertory of every cellist, whether as technical exercises, recital pieces or music to refresh the spirit.” True, though any cellist who would treat these pieces as mere technical exercises ought to find another line of work.

Today and Friday, in Christ Church Cathedral, we will have a welcome opportunity to hear all six suites in concert as part of the Pacific Baroque Series, a joint venture of Early Music Vancouver, the Pacific Baroque Festival and Christ Church, launched this summer.

The performer is Beiliang Zhu, making her local debut as a soloist. A native of Shanghai, Zhu holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, and the Juilliard School, in New York City. She now lives in Vancouver, where she is principal cellist of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, though she is also pursuing a doctorate in performance and a master’s degree in ethnomusicology at Eastman. In 2012, she became the first periodinstrument performer to win the top cello prize at the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition Leipzig, in Germany. She has since earned international acclaim and worked with some of the biggest names in the early-music field.

The six suites together run not much over two hours, but this is highly concentrated music, challenging for performer and listener alike, so Zhu is wise to divide the suites between two programs. She will play Nos. 5, 1 and 3 tonight, Nos. 2, 4 and 6 Friday.

In February 2017, the Lafayette String Quartet, longtime artistsin-residence in the University of Victoria’s School of Music, performed the complete quartets of Shostakovich, and they are currently tackling another cycle, one smaller in scale though no less rich musically: Mozart’s string quintets.

The Mozart quintets call for a string quartet plus a second viola, and that is repertoire readily suited to the LSQ, since its cellist, Pamela Highbaugh Aloni, is married to a violist, Yariv Aloni.

There are six string quintets by Mozart: K. 174, composed in 1773, when he was 17; K. 406, from 1788, which is an arrangement of an earlier work for eight wind instruments; and four masterpieces from his last years, 1787-91.

These four, like his last three symphonies, are so conspicuously individual that they make a fine set — a sort of encyclopedia of the possibilities of the genre. They are among Mozart’s most innovative and exquisite and technically sophisticated instrumental works, greater even than his string quartets, for the richer textures offered by the added viola evidently challenged and inspired him. (Not coincidentally, the viola was the instrument he himself most liked to play in chamber music.)

The LSQ has been invited to perform the Mozart quintets — all six, over two days — early next May in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont. (where they repeated their Shostakovich cycle in April 2017).

We are getting some spillover from this venture, fortunately.

In July, as part of Quartet Fest West, the LSQ and Aloni performed the C-major quintet, K. 515, and this Friday, in the first faculty concert of the season at UVic, they will perform the G-minor quintet, K. 516, a radically original work of unusual intensity and dark passion.

(Whether they will be able to perform all of the quintets here is not yet certain.)

Also on Friday’s program will be Beethoven's concentrated, highly charged, experimental Quartetto serioso in F Minor, Op. 95, from 1810, along with a rarity: the lone string quartet by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944), completed in Rome in 1929.

A single movement running about 13 minutes, Beach’s quartet is interesting and noteworthy in many respects, not least in its quoting of Alaskan Inuit melodies.