Villa series a return to salons of old
Japanese-born pianist Shoko Inoue relishes house-concert settings where she can ‘feel the audience’
What: Music at Wentworth Villa: Piano Music of Robert Schumann, with Shoko Inoue When/where: Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Wentworth Villa (1156 Fort St.) Tickets: $40, students $35. Call 250-598-0760; wentworthvilla.com What: Aventa Ensemble: Chiffre When/where: Sunday, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria); pre-concert talk at 7:15 Tickets: $20. Online at eventbrite.ca
Wentworth Villa, a beautiful Carpenter Gothic mansion built in 1863, is one of the oldest houses in Victoria. Recently restored, it is gradually being converted into a museum devoted to our city’s architectural heritage.
It has also become a venue for music, and in September it launched the first full season of a concert series, Music at Wentworth Villa. The series continues this weekend with an ambitious pair of concerts by Shoko Inoue, an exceptional Japanese-born pianist who moved here from Toronto in 2010.
Both concerts are devoted to the perennially fascinating, perennially challenging music of Schumann, and Inoue’s programs neatly summarize the considerable range of his solo piano music.
On Saturday, she will perform Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, and Kreisleriana, Op. 16, the latter inspired by a fictitious musician who appears in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. These were among more than a dozen “poetic cycles” of short piano pieces Schumann composed in the 1830s — evocative, enigmatic, mosaiclike collections that rank among his most radically original and quintessentially Romantic works.
Sunday’s program explores three other sides of Schumann’s output for the piano.
Inoue will open with the grand, heroic first movement of the Fantasie, Op. 17, which Schumann himself considered the most powerful manifestation of his genius. Completed in 1838, the Fantasie was conceived as a homage to Beethoven while also incorporating many autobiographical resonances, and it offers an idiosyncratic reimagining of Classical sonata form.
Inoue will follow up with something completely different: Bunte Blätter, Op. 99, a set of 14 pieces published in 1852. These, by contrast, are the work of a now more civic-minded musician: accessible pieces intended for amateurs to perform in convivial domestic settings.
Sunday’s program will close with one of Schumann’s last and most moving works: the so-called Ghost Variations, the theme of which came to him in a dream in 1854. An angel sang it to him, he claimed; later, he attributed it to the spirit of Schubert. He then wrote what his wife Clara described as “touching, peaceful variations on the wonderfully peaceful, holy theme.”
Soon after, however, he suffered a mental breakdown and attempted suicide by jumping into the Rhine. He was committed to an asylum, where he died in 1856.
The memories stirred up by the Ghost Variations remained painful for those in Schumann’s circle. In the complete-works edition of his music supervised by Clara and her close associates, only the theme appeared, in 1893; the variations were not published until 1939, and they are still rarely played.
The intimate performing space at Wentworth Villa, reminiscent of salons of old, is perfect for these programs, and for Inoue, who chafes at the formality of conventional concerts and relishes house-concert settings where she can “feel the audience.”
Throughout this weekend’s concerts, local historian Ben Clinton-Baker will read excerpts from Schumann’s letters to Clara and other pertinent writings.
The Aventa Ensemble’s concert on Sunday will be mostly devoted to works by contemporary German composers.
One of them is a curioussounding piece by Gerhard Stäbler, Den Müllfahrern von San Francisco (1990), in which Morse code is used as a compositional device. The work pays homage to the garbage collectors of San Francisco, whose early-morning clatter first annoyed and then inspired Stäbler on a visit to the city.
Originally scored for large ensemble, the work will be performed in a version for seven instruments by Michael Oesterle, who lives in Montreal but was recently the Victoria Symphony’s composer-in-residence for three seasons.
Aventa will perform another septet, Interior at Petworth (2005), by Moritz Eggert, a set of variations inspired by a painting by William Turner, as well as Chiffre V and Chiffre VII, two works for large ensembles by Wolfgang Rihm, drawn from a cycle of eight ensemble pieces he composed under the same title in the 1980s. A prolific and versatile as well as influential composer, Rihm, according to Aventa, is “one of the most radical figures writing today.”
The Eggert and Rihm performances will be Canadian premières.
Aventa will also perform one piece by a contemporary French composer, Philippe Leroux: Air-Ré (1992), for violin and percussion (marimba and vibraphone).