The next faculty concert in the University of Victoria鈥檚 School of Music, on Friday, will be devoted to chamber music for strings with and without guitar (8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, $25/$20/$10; live online at livestream.com/somlive; finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar).
The program is a showcase for guitarist Alexander Dunn, an instructor at both UVic and the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the Chroma Quartet, a Mexican ensemble founded in 2015. Since last year, supervised by the Lafayette String Quartet, Chroma鈥檚 members have been working toward master鈥檚 degrees in UVic鈥檚 string-quartet program 鈥� the only such program in sa国际传媒.
The Chroma Quartet will perform Cuarteto de Cuerdas (2014) by Liova Bueno, a versatile and prolific Dominican-born composer who earned a master鈥檚 in composition at UVic and continues to make Victoria his home (he also teaches at the conservatory). And Dunn will join the ensemble in quintets by Leo Brouwer and Ferdinand Rebay. The former is a Cuban guitarist who is one of the most important contemporary composers for his instrument, the latter a fairly obscure Austrian who died in 1953 and whom Dunn has championed here in recent years. (Rebay鈥檚 quintet, Kleine Fantasie, based on a song by Brahms, will be getting its Canadian premi猫re.)
Friday鈥檚 program will culminate in Mendelssohn鈥檚 popular Octet, the astonishingly original masterpiece he composed at age 16, sealing his status as history鈥檚 greatest musical prodigy. The Chroma will be joined by two new faculty members of the conservatory and two members of the Lafayette.
Two of the most beautiful and memorable concerts of the Early Music Society of the Islands in recent years have featured women鈥檚 vocal ensembles performing unfamiliar, highly specialized repertoire: VocaMe鈥檚 program of chants by the ninth-century Byzantine nun Kassia, and Cappella Artemisia鈥檚 program of 17th-century music from Italian convents, both in 2012.
On Saturday, EMSI will present Psallentes, an a cappella ensemble based in Leuven, Belgium, comprising seven women and directed by its founder, the performer and scholar Hendrik Vanden Abeele (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$25/$23/$8; pre-concert talk 7:10; earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca).
Psallentes (鈥渢hose who sing鈥�), which made its debut in 2000, specializes in plainchant and polyphony from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It has performed all over Europe, and has released almost 30 CDs, one of which, Triptycha (2016), is allied with Saturday鈥檚 program.
The program was inspired by Jan and Hubert van Eyck鈥檚 Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, from 1432, the large complex of paintings housed at a cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, and usually referred to as the Ghent Altarpiece. It is one of the most important and revered works of European art, with a history so fraught that its very survival must count as a miracle.
(It can be viewed, in dazzling detail, at closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be.)
One panel of the Ghent Altarpiece shows a group of female angels singing, and on Saturday the women of Psallentes will impersonate these angels and imagine what they might be singing. Their program comprises nine 鈥渢riptychs,鈥� in which single-voice chants are paired with two-voice Agnus Dei movements from masses by major northern-European composers of the 15th and 16th centuries, including Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin Desprez.
A year ago, the Victoria Symphony鈥檚 music director, Christian Kluxen, led the orchestra in Brahms鈥檚 Fourth Symphony, and in this weekend鈥檚 Masterworks program he will tackle Brahms鈥檚 Third (Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; Royal Theatre, $33-$86; victoriasymphony.ca). Kluxen鈥檚 reading of the Fourth was impassioned and thoughtful, so it will be interesting to hear his take on the Third, a very different though no less ardently Romantic piece.
The program will also include Rachmaninoff鈥檚 perennially popular Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring local pianist Lorraine Min, and Polyphonic Lively (2016), an award-winning piece by the Sri Lankan-born composer, conductor and pianist Dinuk Wijeratne, who lives near Halifax. Wijeratne is a multi-talented musician whose diverse, cosmopolitan work crosses many boundaries.
Polyphonic Lively, which runs about 12 minutes, was inspired by a painting by Paul Klee. The title 鈥渋mmediately conjured up high-vibration, high-intensity 鈥榗hatter鈥�,鈥� Wijeratne writes, and he describes the musical fabric he created as 鈥渁 multiplicity of voices, lines, and themes that decide 鈥� on a whim 鈥� when to coalesce and coexist.鈥�
