There is yet another busy and diverse weekend of classical concerts ahead, including, alarmingly, a couple of harbingers of something I can barely bring myself to name this early: Chr-stm-s.
On Thursday night, the Cascadia Quartet will perform under the auspices of the West Shore Arts Council, in the Victoria Conservatory of Music鈥檚 Westhills Recital Hall, in Langford (7:30 p.m., 1314 Lakepoint Way, $15, under 18 free; ).
The Baroque-themed program includes a concerto grosso by Charles Avison, selections from Bach鈥檚 Goldberg Variations, neo-Baroque essays by Mozart, Respighi and Villa-Lobos, a piece by somebody named Paul McCartney, and Corelli鈥檚 Christmas Concerto, with its lovely Pastorale finale depicting shepherds at the manger.
On Friday, the Victoria Chamber Orchestra, too, will offer a choice program of Baroque fare, with Hollas Longton, a member of its first-violin section, assuming soloist duties in a Bach concerto (7:30 p.m., First Metropolitan United Church, $20/$15, music students free; repeat performance Sunday, Saturna Island; ).
Bach aside, the program has an English slant, including a symphony by William Boyce, concerto grossos by Avison and Handel (an honorary Englishman) and, again, Corelli鈥檚 Christmas Concerto. (In England, Corelli鈥檚 concertos were more popular even than Handel鈥檚, well into the 19th century.)
There will be an early-music component to Friday鈥檚 concert of the Sidney Classical Orchestra, too (7:30 p.m., St. Elizabeth鈥檚 Catholic Church, $25/$13, under 20 free; ).
Susan de Burgh will be the soloist in Bach鈥檚 powerful Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, and the orchestra鈥檚 music director, Stephen Brown, will lead his own arrangement of one of Handel鈥檚 Water Music suites.
Brown will also conduct the premi猫re of The Adventures of Sally and Her Motorcycle, his own work for speaker and chamber orchestra, with Robert Holliston narrating.
The half-hour piece tells of a young girl undertaking a road trip with her brother and his dog, seeking the one Giant Thing that will bring happiness and prosperity to their small sa国际传媒 town.
On Saturday, George Corwin will return to the DieMahler Chamber Music Series as guest conductor in an all-French program of nonets (2:30 p.m., Church of St. Mary the Virgin, 1701 Elgin Rd., $25/$22.50, students by donation; ).
Corwin, who retired from the University of Victoria鈥檚 School of Music in 1995 after 26 years as a professor and conductor there, has had a special interest in the nonet medium since his days teaching at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s, and he researched nonet literature on a study leave in France in 1986.
In June, for the DieMahler series, Corwin conducted nonets by Louis Spohr and two modern Czech composers.
He has programmed three more for Saturday, one of them an idiosyncratic specimen by Ravel: Trois po猫mes de St茅phane Mallarm茅 (1913), a short song cycle for voice and nine instruments (it will be sung by soprano Dawna Beach).
The other two works feature the 鈥渃lassical鈥� nonet scoring: woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn) plus violin, viola, cello and bass.
Both are from the late 1840s, by unfairly neglected French composers: George Onslow, who left a huge body of chamber music and was especially renowned in German-speaking countries in the early 19th century; and Louise Farrenc, who was also a pianist and scholar and an influential professor at the Paris Conservatoire for more than 30 years.
(Farrenc鈥檚 Piano Quintet was performed in June in the Eine Kleine Summer Music festival.)
Finally, on Sunday (2:30 p.m.) and Monday (8 p.m.), the Victoria Symphony will offer a Masterworks program comprising three perennially popular suites (Respighi, Grieg, Stravinsky) as well as the Sinfonia Concertante for four wind instruments and orchestra by 鈥淢ozart鈥� (Royal Theatre, $33-$86; ).
Why the quotation marks?
This work purports to be the sinfonia concertante Mozart claimed to have written in Paris in 1778, but it survives only in a questionable manuscript that surfaced in the late 1860s.
The authenticity and quality of this work have been endlessly debated (a 472-page book on the subject appeared in 1988), and, perhaps inevitably, those who believe Mozart wrote it always think it鈥檚 a much better piece than those who don鈥檛.
