Early Music sees top-flight soprano and Montreal ensemble draw on joys of Purcell

The music of Henry Purcell is a bottomless trove of delights, and we are fortunate that many local and visiting musicians have been drawn to it in recent years. Purcell will be in the spotlight again on Saturday, in the final concert of the season of the Early Music Society of the Islands (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, pre-concert talk 7:10; $30/$25/$22, student rush $8; earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca).

The program, comprising solo-vocal and instrumental numbers, focuses on the theatrical music Purcell wrote in the last years of his short life. (He died in 1695, at age 36.) Most of the music is drawn from King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, two of his four “semi-operas,” the latter an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Among the other pieces on the program are selections from the more than 40 plays for which he wrote songs and other incidental music, and, to conclude, the famous lament (When I am laid in earth) from his only opera, Dido and Aeneas.

The program could hardly be in better hands: The featured soloist is internationally renowned soprano Karina Gauvin, who is particularly admired in concert and operatic music by Handel, Bach, Mozart, and other early composers. She will be joined by Les Boréades de Montréal, a superb ensemble founded in 1991 (and still directed) by Francis Colpron. For Saturday’s program, the ensemble will comprise nine instrumentalists: Colpron, who plays recorders and flute, plus others playing recorders, oboe, strings, and harpsichord.

Gauvin’s large and diverse discography, incidentally, includes an all-Purcell 2006 album with Les Boréades, on the ATMA Classique label, that reproduces almost exactly the repertoire on Saturday’s program. It’s gorgeous.

Also on Saturday, the women’s choir Ensemble Laude will wrap up its season with a typically wide-ranging concert titled The Open Window, (7:30 p.m., First Church of Christ, Scientist; door $20, advance $18, students $15, under 13 free; ensemblelaude.org).

The program includes arrangements of traditional music from various countries (Norway, Estonia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, the U.S.), and a large selection of works by Canadians. Among the latter is How Can I Keep From Singing!, by Sarah Quartel, a former Victoria resident now living in Gananoque, Ont. The piece is a lovely hymn arrangement she wrote on commission for Laude, in the wake of their tour of southern France last summer.

Laude and three instrumentalists will close their program with From Behind the Caravan, by American composer Abbie Betinis, a song cycle drawing on poems by the 14th-century Persian mystic Hâfez.

On Monday, May 1, Tania Miller will make the penultimate appearance of her 14-year tenure as music director of the Victoria Symphony (8 p.m., Royal Theatre, $32-$82; victoriasymphony.ca).

Her program will culminate in the popular Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius, whose music she has conspicuously championed here. Since 2005, the orchestra has performed five of Sibelius’s seven symphonies (most with Miller conducting), plus the Violin Concerto and other works. In one memorable 2015 concert, Miller gave authoritative readings of two of the symphonies, Nos. 4 and 7. (These performances can be heard on the orchestra’s YouTube channel.)

Miller will also welcome one of her (and Victoria’s) favourite concerto soloists, Sara Davis Buechner, who since last year has taught at Temple University, in Philadelphia. (Previously, she was based for 13 years in Vancouver.)

Buechner has offered conspicuously interesting repertoire in her appearances here: concertos by Ravel and Stravinsky; rarely played works by Mozart, Dvorák, Falla, and Strauss; film music; a brand-new concerto by Dutch composer Wim Zwagg. Her performances are always commanding and vivid.

On Monday, she will perform Bartók’s notoriously difficult Piano Concerto No. 2, the sort of five-alarm fingerbuster she always tackles fearlessly and with relish.

The program will open with the premiere of a short piece commissioned by the orchestra in Miller’s honour: Field of Light, by the conductor and composer Bramwell Tovey, who was one of Miller’s mentors. From 2000 to 2004, she was assistant and associate conductor under him at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

The new work, Tovey says, “is inspired by what so many vets talked about as the light began to dawn on the morning of battle.”