What: Victoria Symphony (Explorations): New Music Festival.
When/where: March 28 and March 30, 8 p.m., Dave Dunnet Community Theatre (Oak Bay High School, 2121 Cadboro Bay Rd.).
Tickets: $25, students $20. Call 250-386-6121 or 250-385-6515; online at ; in person at the Royal Theatre or the Victoria Symphony box office (610-620 View St.).
What: Aventa Ensemble: Son of Chamber Symphony.
When/where: Sunday, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria); pre-concert talk 7:15.
Tickets: $20.
Fans of contemporary music can look forward to three very diverse concerts over the next few days, all conducted by Bill Linwood.
Linwood is co-founder and artistic director of the Aventa Ensemble, the city鈥檚 premier new-music group, as well as principal timpanist of the Victoria Symphony.
Since last season, he has been curating (and mostly conducting) the orchestra鈥檚 Explorations series, which has been notably adventurous on his watch.
Tonight and Saturday, the Explorations series will offer the final two concerts of a new-music festival that was scheduled to begin last night with a performance by the Emily Carr String Quartet and mezzo-soprano Marion Newman.
The festival is showcasing all seven of the Victoria Symphony鈥檚 former composers-in-residence.
The ECSQ鈥檚 program included works by two of them, Tobin Stokes (who served from 2005 to 2008) and Jared Miller (2014-17), while tonight鈥檚 program features music by Stokes, Miller, Christopher Butterfield (1999-2002), Douglas Schmidt (2002-05), Rodney Sharman (2008-11) and Michael Oesterle (2011-14).
The program includes one premi猫re, of Miller鈥檚 Ricochet-Reverb-Repeat, a short piece commissioned by the orchestra. Miller describes the piece as 鈥渁 study in musical texture,鈥� and it explores, among other things, echo effects and the medieval device known as 鈥渉ocket.鈥�
Saturday鈥檚 concert focuses on a single major work by another former composer-in-residence: Nuyamil-il Kulhulmx: Singing the Earth (2013), a 鈥渃oncert-installation鈥� for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble by Anna H枚stman (2005-08, jointly with Stokes).
H枚stman, who earned bachelor鈥檚 and master鈥檚 degrees in music at the University of Victoria, is now a visiting assistant professor of composition there.
Singing the Earth 鈥渋s an artistic response to the people, environment and spirit of the Bella Coola Valley of coastal British Columbia,鈥� H枚stman writes. 鈥淚t draws on historical and contemporary sources in four languages (Nuxalk, Norwegian, English and Japanese) to create 11 short pieces about an isolated and beautiful place.鈥�
The work is a synthesis of music, installation, found texts, erasure poetry, audio interviews, photography and video projections, and its creation, which spanned two years, was a collaborative process involving other artists, including Marion Newman, who has roots in the Kwagiulth and St贸:lo First Nations and will participate in Saturday鈥檚 performance.
Preceding Singing the Earth will be a screening of Cry Rock, an award-winning half-hour documentary from 2010 written, produced and directed by Banchi Hanuse and dealing with traditional stories in the Nuxalk language, of which only a few speakers remain in Bella Coola.
The Victoria Symphony鈥檚 current composer-in residence, Marcus Goddard, will serve as host and will chat with the composers at these two concerts, and a recent, 鈥渄ream-like鈥� piece of his, Pool of Lost Grooves, will figure in the final concert of the Aventa Ensemble鈥檚 own season, on Sunday.
In addition to being a prolific composer with a significant profile, Goddard has been a trumpeter in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for almost 20 years.
Aventa鈥檚 concert will also include Sharman鈥檚 two-movement, 20-minute Chamber Symphony (2012), which, he writes, 鈥渋s about form as an organic process, not a narrative,鈥� and is 鈥渋n dialogue with Classical form.鈥�
The biggest work on Sunday鈥檚 program is Son of Chamber Symphony (2007), by John Adams, a New Englander who has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1971.
Adams is among the most celebrated and honoured American composers of our time 鈥� just last month, he was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Prize 鈥� as well as a conductor, writer and teacher of note.
He wrote Son of Chamber Symphony for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, after hearing them perform his Chamber Symphony (1992), and he chose a whimsical title for the sequel in order to avoid the more banal Chamber Symphony No. 2.
Scored for 17 players, the work runs a little over 20 minutes and has three movements, busy outer movements framing a more lyrical central one. The music is accessible but full of surprises, and delightfully eclectic: The first movement is launched by a motif borrowed from the scherzo of Beethoven鈥檚 Ninth Symphony, but a minute later you鈥檇 swear you had stepped into West Side Story.
Sunday鈥檚 performance will neatly complement Linwood鈥檚 vivid, exciting reading of Adams鈥檚 Doctor Atomic Symphony last April with the Victoria Symphony.
