UVic’s Orion Series presents baritone Polegato
On Friday, the University of Victoria’s Orion Series in Fine Arts will present the outstanding Canadian baritone Brett Polegato in recital with pianist Robert Kortgaard (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, admission free; finearts.uvic.ca/music/events).
Polegato has had an impressive international career as an opera, concert and recording artist, and has long been known to local audiences. His first appearance with Pacific Opera Victoria was in 1993, his most recent one just last October, and he will return to POV in February 2018, in Puccini’s La bohème.
This season, he has his usual wide range of operatic and orchestral commitments, around Canada and abroad, but he and Kortgaard, both of whom are based in Toronto, are undertaking a West Coast recital tour with a program that is essentially a cabaret act — a mix of songs drawn mostly from the musical theatre, from both sides of the Atlantic, interspersed with stories and some solo-piano pieces.
The program begins in the 1920s, with selections from operettas by Sigmund Romberg, and concludes with Stephen Sondheim. In between are songs by major figures including Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, Noël Coward, Marc Blitzstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein; numbers from musicals ranging from Carousel and Man of La Mancha to Chess and Les Misérables; and the Billy Joel song from which the concert gets its title, And So It Goes …
As Polegato notes, the musical theatre repertoire is rich with songs for lyric baritone, songs that were first sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Gordon MacRae, Howard Keel, John Raitt and Robert Goulet.
And he loves the recital format — standing before an audience and holding it captive, unaided by the trappings of opera, by telling stories through song.
“My goal was to be a concert singer, a recitalist,” he said recently. “Opera is what I do to pay the bills.”
In January 2015, I hailed a “rare but welcome” opportunity to hear the string-quartet version of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words. The work remains welcome, but suddenly seems no longer rare.
On March 19, the Victoria Symphony performed excerpts from the original orchestral version of it, and on Saturday the complete quartet version will be performed again, by the Emily Carr String Quartet, at St. Andrew’s Cathedral, as part of a concert series celebrating the cathedral’s 125th anniversary (2 p.m., $20/$10; emilycarrstringquartet.com).
The Seven Last Words, composed about 1785, is an extraordinary specimen of instrumental sacred music. It is an hour-long sequence of seven meditative slow movements, one corresponding to each of the last utterances of the crucified Christ, bracketed by a grave introduction and a furious finale depicting the earthquake that followed Christ’s death.
This is apt programming two weeks before Easter, and indeed Haydn composed the orchestral original for special Holy Week church services in Cadiz, Spain. He considered it one of his greatest works, and it proved so successful that he released it not only in the string-quartet version but also in a keyboard arrangement, and recast it years later as a choral-orchestral oratorio.
Saturday’s program also includes another seven-movement cycle, Feathers, by local composer Tobin Stokes. The ECSQ commissioned this work — one of three it has commissioned from Canadian composers, all inspired by Carr’s work — and gave the première in May 2014.
Feathers was inspired by descriptions of birds found among Carr’s writings; one of its movements bears the charming title Turkeys.
Also on Saturday, the Victoria Symphony will present a Masterworks program bookended by Mozart’s joyous “Haffner” Symphony (No. 35) and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1, which he composed in 1824, at age 15 (8 p.m., Royal Theatre, $32-$82; victoriasymphony.ca).
In between will be Mozart’s glorious Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364, a double concerto for violin and viola. It is a work of uncommon richness, even by Mozart’s standard, surely because of the presence of the solo viola. Mozart loved the viola, played it well himself, and wrote with special depth, beauty and originality whenever he featured it.
Saturday’s performance will be led by the orchestra’s conductor-in-residence, Giuseppe Pietraroia, with soloists drawn from its ranks: principal second violinist Victoria Lindsay and principal violist Kenji Fuse.