Sensuous chamber duets from Italy, via Boston
What: Early Music Society of the Islands: Duets of Love and Passion, with the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble. When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall; pre-concert talk 7:10. Tickets: $40, seniors and students $35, members $30, student rush $10, under 18 free with ticket holder. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the McPherson box office, Ivy’s Bookshop, Long & McQuade and Munro’s Books. What: Victoria Symphony (Masterworks): Ehnes Plays Britten. When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; Royal Theatre. Tickets: $32-$85. Call 250-386-6121 or 250-385-6515; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the Royal Theatre box office and the Victoria Symphony (610-620 View St.). In March 2014, the Early Music Society of the Islands, in collaboration with Pacific Opera Victoria, sponsored the most ambitious and expensive undertaking in its long history: Orphée, comprising two fully staged chamber operas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, from the mid-1680s. This memorable event was Victoria’s introduction to French Baroque opera, which, even in the biggest cities, is a rare treat.
Orphée was a production of the Boston Early Music Festival, an eminent, internationally celebrated organization founded in 1980 and particularly admired for its groundbreaking revivals of Baroque operas.
On Saturday, the BEMF will return to Victoria, with its chamber ensemble, to present an evening of vocal chamber music by Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), an Italian composer who spent most of his life in Germany. Steffani was a major figure in opera, but is most celebrated for his dozens of works for two solo voices with basso continuo.
These chamber duets resemble short cantatas, with up to six movements that can include recitatives, solo arias and duos. The music — expressive, sensuous, virtuosic — is very flattering to the voice (Steffani was himself an excellent singer), and the texts, most of which deal with unrequited love, are set with great sensitivity.
Steffani’s duets count as an important repertoire of Italian Baroque secular vocal music. Many later composers took them as models, and they were widely admired through the 18th century and beyond. They exerted a particular influence on the young Handel, who acknowledged as much and, indeed, was not above stealing ideas from Steffani’s music.
The Boston Early Music Festival has made something of a specialty of Steffani’s music. In 2011, it mounted his opera Niobe, regina di Tebe (it later toured with and recorded that production), and in 2019 it will mount his opera Orlando generoso.
Saturday’s program includes seven Steffani duets, for various pairs of voices, plus a few instrumental works including Handel's set of variations for harpsichord popularly known as “The Harmonious Blacksmith.”
Among the eight performers are four first-rate singers: sopranos Amanda Forsythe and Emöke Baráth, tenor Colin Balzer and baritone Christian Immler. The instrumental quartet will comprise Baroque guitar (played by lutenist Stephen Stubbs, one of the BEMF’s musical directors), Baroque harp, viola da gamba and harpsichord.
Victoria is the second stop on a 10-day, six-city North American tour marking the recent release of the festival’s CD of Steffani duets, with the same singers, on the German label CPO.
On Sept. 18, conductor Christian Kluxen launched his first season as the Victoria Symphony’s music director with a commanding performance of Mahler’s mighty Symphony No. 1, the Titan.
Kluxen will return on Saturday and Sunday to lead his first pair of weekend Masterworks concerts. Again, the program will be an excellent test of his range, comprising a première, a concerto with a big-name soloist and a staple of the standard repertoire.
The première is Sun Exhaling Light, by Harry Stafylakis, a Montreal native who lives in New York and is currently composer-inresidence with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and director of the Winnipeg New Music Festival. The 10-minute piece was commissioned by the Victoria Symphony.
The concerto is Britten’s lone Violin Concerto, from 1939, and the soloist is the great Canadian violinist James Ehnes, who last appeared here a year ago in a sold-out recital that was sponsored by the Victoria Summer Music Festival and was part of a cross-country tour celebrating his 40th birthday.
And the staple of the standard repertoire, taking up the second half of this weekend’s program, is Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, which places not just tonal and expressive, but also very particular intellectual demands on a conductor.
On Friday, Ehnes will appear at the University of Victoria’s School of Music, as part of its 50thanniversary celebrations and under the auspices of the Orion Series in Fine Arts. At 10 a.m., he will lead a masterclass for string students, and at 12:30 p.m. he will participate in an on-stage conversation and Q-and-A session (both Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, free admission; finearts.uvic.ca/music/ calendar/events).