Faculty concert a showcase for guitarist
The next faculty concert in the University of Victoria’s School of Music, on Friday, will be devoted to chamber music for strings with and without guitar (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, $25/$20/$10; live online at livestream.com/somlive; finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar).
The program is a showcase for guitarist Alexander Dunn, an instructor at both UVic and the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the Chroma Quartet, a Mexican ensemble founded in 2015. Since last year, supervised by the Lafayette String Quartet, Chroma’s members have been working toward master’s degrees in UVic’s string-quartet program — the only such program in Canada.
The Chroma Quartet will perform Cuarteto de Cuerdas (2014) by Liova Bueno, a versatile and prolific Dominican-born composer who earned a master’s in composition at UVic and continues to make Victoria his home (he also teaches at the conservatory). And Dunn will join the ensemble in quintets by Leo Brouwer and Ferdinand Rebay. The former is a Cuban guitarist who is one of the most important contemporary composers for his instrument, the latter a fairly obscure Austrian who died in 1953 and whom Dunn has championed here in recent years. (Rebay’s quintet, Kleine Fantasie, based on a song by Brahms, will be getting its Canadian première.)
Friday’s program will culminate in Mendelssohn’s popular Octet, the astonishingly original masterpiece he composed at age 16, sealing his status as history’s greatest musical prodigy. The Chroma will be joined by two new faculty members of the conservatory and two members of the Lafayette.
Two of the most beautiful and memorable concerts of the Early Music Society of the Islands in recent years have featured women’s vocal ensembles performing unfamiliar, highly specialized repertoire: VocaMe’s program of chants by the ninthcentury Byzantine nun Kassia, and Cappella Artemisia’s program of 17th-century music from Italian convents, both in 2012.
On Saturday, EMSI will present Psallentes, an a cappella ensemble based in Leuven, Belgium, comprising seven women and directed by its founder, the performer and scholar Hendrik Vanden Abeele (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$25/$23/$8; pre-concert talk 7:10; early musicsocietyoftheislands.ca).
Psallentes (“those who sing”), which made its debut in 2000, specializes in plainchant and polyphony from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It has performed all over Europe, and has released almost 30 CDs, one of which, Triptycha (2016), is allied with Saturday’s program.
The program was inspired by Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, from 1432, the large complex of paintings housed at a cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, and usually referred to as the Ghent Altarpiece. It is one of the most important and revered works of European art, with a history so fraught that its very survival must count as a miracle.
(It can be viewed, in dazzling detail, at closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be.)
One panel of the Ghent Altarpiece shows a group of female angels singing, and on Saturday the women of Psallentes will impersonate these angels and imagine what they might be singing. Their program comprises nine “triptychs,” in which single-voice chants are paired with two-voice Agnus Dei movements from masses by major northern-European composers of the 15th and 16th centuries, including Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin Desprez.
A year ago, the Victoria Symphony’s music director, Christian Kluxen, led the orchestra in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, and in this weekend’s Masterworks program he will tackle Brahms’s Third (Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; Royal Theatre, $33-$86; victoriasymphony.ca). Kluxen’s reading of the Fourth was impassioned and thoughtful, so it will be interesting to hear his take on the Third, a very different though no less ardently Romantic piece.
The program will also include Rachmaninoff’s perennially popular Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring local pianist Lorraine Min, and Polyphonic Lively (2016), an award-winning piece by the Sri Lankan-born composer, conductor and pianist Dinuk Wijeratne, who lives near Halifax. Wijeratne is a multi-talented musician whose diverse, cosmopolitan work crosses many boundaries.
Polyphonic Lively, which runs about 12 minutes, was inspired by a painting by Paul Klee. The title “immediately conjured up high-vibration, high-intensity ‘chatter’,” Wijeratne writes, and he describes the musical fabric he created as “a multiplicity of voices, lines, and themes that decide — on a whim — when to coalesce and coexist.”