ANNIVERSARY CONCERTS ABOUND ON METRO SCENE
Langley music school, Vancouver Recital Society get party started
In the final days before the festive holiday season becomes our main preoccupation, two very different local groups plan festive events of a different kind.
It’s the golden anniversary year of the Langley Community Music School and its latest event is a Made in Canada Concert; while celebrating 40 years of the Vancouver Recital Society, the “made-in-Canada” soprano Measha Brueggergosman sings at the Chan.
Canada Music Week, an annual event in the calendars of most music educators, has had particular emphasis at the LCMS, so it’s no surprise to see there will be a grand event this year. The school’s commitment to creating new repertoire is unprecedented: More than 40 works have been commissioned and performed over half a century of music making and teaching.
This year’s program features Jocelyn Morlock’s Dervish for violin and piano; David MacIntyre’s Berceuse for piano trio; and the late Nikolai Korndorf’s Lament for cello and piano.
There will also be premieres of two newly commissioned works: a jazz-inspired Concerto for Two Pianos by Marcel Bergmann, and Brad Turner’s Music for an Occasion.
LCMS composer-in-residence Bergmann knows a thing or three about writing for two pianos; he and wife Elizabeth have long been a respected piano duo. For this concert, their backup orchestra is the Turning Point Ensemble.
The Vancouver Recital Society needed no special event to ask Brueggergosman for a return visit. When VRS founder and artistic director Leila Getz was mulling over her artists and repertoire for this special 40th-anniversary season, Brueggergosman was high on the list of the “must-haves.”
Brueggergosman made her VRS debut back in 2003 and made a return visit in 2010; Getz figured that her loyal audience was clamouring for yet another chance to hear one of Canada’s star singers.
As it turned out, there was some unexpected — and profoundly unwanted — drama: earlier this summer, Brueggergosman had double bypass heart surgery in Calgary.
Countless well-wishers held their collective breath.
Characteristically, Getz didn’t even think about a substitute; it would be Measha or no concert: “Measha is such a unique personality and performer that I don’t know of any singer who could fill her shoes.”
Post-op recovery went well and Brueggergosman is back at work (though, one hopes, taking it just a bit easy for a while).
She’ll be here for her November date at the Chan with pianist Justus Zeyen and the local Black Dog String Quartet, an ensemble that can carry off classical and contemporary repertoire, then back up the likes of the Matthew Good Band or open for Sarah McLachlan.
Brueggergosman’s program is a fusion of recital, salon concert and party, with repertoire by Purcell
and Britten, some lightweight charmers by Catalan composer (and music critic) Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) and some spirituals.
Earlier in the fall, Getz told me that in keeping with the party atmosphere, certain concert formalities will be eschewed — for example, printed texts but no program notes.
On a sentimental yet entirely appropriate note, Brueggergosman is dedicating her performance to the memory of the utterly incomparable Jessye Norman.
Vancouver concertgoers with long memories will recall Norman’s two Orpheum recitals for the VRS in 1992 and 1993.