Five choral concerts kick off Christmas music season
Usually, the launch of our holiday-music season corresponds roughly to the start of Advent (this year, Dec. 2), though two instrumental ensembles got a jump on things last week by performing Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.
The season begins in earnest this weekend, with five choral concerts, three of which will kick off our annual Messiah run.
The Sooke Philharmonic will give two performances of Handel’s imperishable oratorio, conducted by Nicholas Fairbank (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Royal Bay Secondary School, Colwood; Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Sooke Community Hall; $25/$20, under 19 free; sookephil.ca).
A 30-piece ensemble will accompany four vocal soloists, all of them young local professionals, and about 75 voices drawn from two groups directed by Fairbank, the Philharmonic’s Chorus and Via Choralis, a Saanich-based community choir.
(Also on Saturday, Mozart’s glorious arrangement of Messiah will be performed in Duncan by the Cowichan Consort Orchestra and Choir and soloists including bass-baritone Gary Relyea. Details: cowichanconsort.com.)
The other two choral concerts, both on Saturday, feature the Linden Singers of Victoria and the combined forces of the University of Victoria’s Chorus, Chamber Singers and Vocal Jazz Ensemble — more than 250 voices in all.
The Linden Singers, numbering about 50 and directed by Brian Wismath, will offer familiar carols but also two beautiful, popular specimens of the sort of interesting but accessible modern music Wismath likes to program: A Christmas Cantata (1947), by English composer Geoffrey Bush, and Seven Joys of Christmas (1964), a charming suite by American composer Kirke Mechem, who remains active at age 93 (7:30 p.m., Church of St. Mary the Virgin, 1701 Elgin Rd., $20, under 25 free; lindensingers.com).
Bush’s piece runs about half an hour, Mechem’s about 15 minutes, and both of them combine original material with traditional carols from England and elsewhere. (Mechem’s seven joys, for the record, are love, bells, Mary, children, New Year, dance and song.)
Both pieces will feature soprano soloist Jessica Wagner, and oboist Alexandra Pohran-Dawkins will have a prominent solo role in Bush’s cantata.
The UVic choirs, joined by UVic brass students, will perform at Christ Church Cathedral (7 p.m., by donation; finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar).
Their program will include traditional music for Christmas and Hanukkah, American spirituals and works by contemporary American composers: John Alexander’s A Carol Fantasy, Randol Alan Bass’s Gloria and Glow, by the very popular Eric Whitacre.
“Plan to arrive early to get a seat,” we are warned. “This annual event fills to capacity.”
Meanwhile, there are some concert series that are not yet done for the year and are bravely resisting the lure of Christmas-themed fare.
On Friday, for instance, the Victoria Guitar Society is sponsoring an appearance by the young virtuoso Robert Wang, who was born in Shanghai but now lives in Vancouver and takes lessons from Alexander Dunn at the Victoria Conservatory of Music (7:30 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, UVic, advance $25/$20, door $30/$25, students under 30 free; victoriaguitarsociety.ca).
Though he is just 18, Wang has already won prizes in several international guitar competitions, and he is an established composer, too.
His diverse, centuries-spanning program on Friday will show off his versatility, ranging from Dowland and Bach through Villa-Lobos and Rodrigo to recent works by Roland Dyens and Carlo Domeniconi, an Italian guitarist who has high praise for Wang.
And on Saturday morning, the Emily Carr String Quartet will offer its first Music: Inside Out program of the season, devoted to Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1 (refreshments 10:30 a.m., concert 11 a.m., Chief and Petty Officer’s Mess, CFB Esquimalt, 1575 Lyall St., $25, students free; emilycarrstringquartet.com).
Robert Holliston will discuss the work before the quartet’s performance.
Tchaikovsky, one of the few Russian Romantics to cultivate chamber music, wrote three masterly quartets in the 1870s, though No. 1 has always been especially popular because of its moving slow movement, which is based on an old Russian song (“Vanya sat on the divan, pouring out a glass of rum”).
This movement was famous already in Tchaikovsky’s day, in Russia and abroad, in its original form and in his arrangement for cello and string orchestra, and one of the composer’s proudest moments was seeing Tolstoy burst into tears while listening to it.