SPECIAL GUESTS CAP CHAMBER SEASONS
Pianist, up-and-coming quartet boast Vancouver connections
Two Vancouver chamber music groups wind up their 2015/16 seasons over the next few days, and both plan to celebrate with special guests.
For the long-running Vetta Chamber Music, pianist Angela Cheng comes to call, featured in music by Mozart and Brahms. At the Vancouver Academy of Music, the Koerner String Quartet greets the up-and-coming Rolston String Quartet for a program that includes a joint performance of one of the sublime masterworks of the chamber repertoire, Mendelssohn’s fabulous Octet.
When I spoke with Vetta’s artistic director Joan Blackman at the start of the season, the organization’s 30th anniversary was very much on her mind. This was a year to remember three decades of chamber music making among friends, while looking ahead to future endeavours.
These complementary visions have played out in a number of ways: one highlight was the return of Vetta founders violinist Victor Costanzi and cellist Eugene Osadchy in a program last fall; then there was a special 30th anniver-
sary commission that teamed composer Jeffrey Ryan and storyteller Rosemary Georgeson.
Now comes the grand season finale — at downtown’s Christ Church Cathedral, no less — featuring Cheng in one of Mozart’s own arrangements of a concerto adapted for piano and string quartet, and Brahms’s magisterial F minor piano quintet.
Cheng is an indisputable Vancouver favourite: born in Hong Kong, she grew up in Edmonton and is now a stalwart of the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory.
Years ago I called her “one of the best Mozart players around,” describing her sound as “transparent and sparkling.” I haven’t changed my opinion. We’re lucky she maintains the strongest of Vancouver connections, and her fans will no doubt flock to the attractive Vetta program.
The Vancouver Academy of Music’s ensemble-in-residence, the Koerner String Quartet, marks the end of its season on home turf, the Koerner Recital Hall in the VAM building at Vanier Park.
Executive director Joseph Elworthy, who is also the cellist of the quartet, let slip that there are big plans afoot for the performance space: a scheme to remodel and improve the recital hall.
The Koerner’s guest is the young Rolston String Quartet, based at Rice University in Houston, but with a strong VAM connection. Elworthy explains that two of the musicians started out at the VAM before the ensemble coalesced at the Banff Centre.
Their name pays homage to the late Thomas Rolston, violinist, teacher, longtime maven of Banff music, and a true hero in the western Canadian music scene.
Born and initially trained in Vancouver, Rolston spent much of the 1950s in Europe before returning to Canada to teach at the University of Alberta and act as concertmaster for the Edmonton Symphony. He began his association with the Banff Centre in the ’60s, where he and his wife, pianist Isobel Moore, transformed that institution’s musical offerings.
Appropriately, the Rolston Quartet will be competitors in this summer’s Banff International String Quartet Competition.
While in Vancouver they will be doing double duty, working with students in a master class as well as performing.
The June 5 program starts out with quartets: Debussy (from the Koerner), Haydn (from the Rolston), then a grand union of both quartets in the Mendelssohn.