What: Victoria Symphony (Masterworks): Miller Conducts Shostakovich.
When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; Royal Theatre.
Tickets: $32-$82. 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.).
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What: Emily Carr String Quartet: Music Inside Out - Mendelssohn.
When/where: Saturday, refreshments and silent auction 10:30 a.m., concert 11, Pacific Fleet Club (1587 Lyall St.).
Tickets: $25, students free. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca or eventbrite.ca; in person at Ivy鈥檚 Bookshop and the Royal and McPherson box offices.
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On May 1, in the penultimate outing of her 14-year tenure as music director of the Victoria Symphony, Tania Miller led a program that was full of old friends and favourite repertoire and summarized some of her strengths and priorities as a conductor.
The program opened with the premi猫re of Field of Light, a deeply expressive piece inspired by the Battle of Vimy Ridge, composed by Bramwell Tovey, music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. It was commissioned by the Victoria Symphony in honour of Miller, who served under Tovey at the VSO from 2000 to 2004.
Miller and pianist Sara Davis Buechner, a local favourite, then tackled Bart贸k鈥檚 Piano Concerto No. 2, with Buechner tearing into the cruelly difficult solo part with wall-rattling ferocity and passion.
Finally, Miller led an ardent and vivid reading of Sibelius鈥檚 Second Symphony that demonstrated her impressive technical skill: the performance was superbly controlled not only from moment to moment but on the largest scale, in terms of the shaping of whole movements and the placement of climaxes, only most obviously in the finale.
This weekend, in her last concerts as music director, Miller has chosen a program well suited to the occasion, one in which old friends and favourite repertoire again figure prominently.
To begin, she will underscore, one last time, her admirable devotion to new music and young Canadian composers, by giving the premi猫re of a piece by Jared Miller, whose three-season tenure as the orchestra鈥檚 composer-in-residence is also coming to an end.
The first time Miller led the Victoria Symphony, as a guest conductor in February 2003, her program included a Shostakovich violin concerto and a Tchaikovsky symphony. This weekend, she will focus on the same two composers, now with the genres reversed.
In Tchaikovsky鈥檚 Violin Concerto, she will welcome another soloist with whom she has a special connection: Timothy Chooi, who was born and raised here and was selected by Miller as a Young Soloist in the 2007 Splash concert. Chooi was then a 13-year-old prodigy but is now a rising star 鈥� an acclaimed concert soloist, a听recording artist, a prizewinner in competitions, and, as of last month, a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia. (He plays a 1717 Stradivarius on loan from the sa国际传媒 Council鈥檚 Musical Instrument Bank.) Miller will bring her tenure to an end with Shostakovich鈥檚 moving and heroic (though also ambivalent) Symphony No. 5, from 1937, the work with which the composer sought to 鈥渞ehabilitate鈥� himself with the Soviet regime in the wake of the official denunciation of his music the year before.
Shostakovich, like Sibelius, is a composer whom Miller has championed here: she has conducted his Fifth Symphony once before, in 2004, as well as his Ninth and Tenth. And she has always performed music by early-modern composers like these (and Nielsen, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bart贸k) stylishly and with authority.
Miller will discuss the Shostakovich Fifth in her final Tania Talk beginning an hour before each concert.
On Saturday morning, to close out their season, the Emily Carr String Quartet will present another instalment in their series Music Inside Out, in which a single major quartet is discussed and performed. This time, it is Mendelssohn鈥檚 String Quartet No.听2, Op. 13, which will be introduced by the popular local pianist and lecturer Robert Holliston.
This choice of repertoire is neatly appropriate: ECSQ鈥檚 season began, in October, with a Music Inside Out program devoted to Beethoven鈥檚 late Op.听132 quartet, which was Mendelssohn鈥檚 model in Op. 13. Mendelssohn completed the work in October 1827, seven months after Beethoven鈥檚 death, and the music is saturated with allusions (general and specific) to Op. 132 and Beethoven鈥檚 other late quartets. Indeed, though just 18 at the time, Mendelssohn was one of few musicians in his day to grapple with the intimidating legacy of Beethoven鈥檚 strange, radical late works.
Op. 13 is something of a specialty for the ECSQ; they have programmed it here several times over the years. In February 2013, they gave a performance of it that I described as 鈥渃ommanding鈥� and 鈥渇erociously intense鈥� 鈥� a performance that I still remember.