The Emily Carr String Quartet is celebrating its 10th anniversary this season, and on Monday, 10 years almost to the day after its début, it will mark the milestone with a gala concert in which it will share the stage with other notable local musicians.
This superb quartet still comprises its founding members: violinists Müge Büyükçelen and Cory Balzer, violist Mieka Michaux and cellist Alasdair Money. (The latter two were both born here.) All four have busy solo, chamber-music and orchestral careers outside the quartet, too, including work with other local groups — the Victoria Symphony, the Aventa Ensemble, the Galiano Ensemble and the Victoria Baroque Players.
Over the past decade, the scope of the quartet’s activities has continually broadened.
It has collaborated with many other performers — pianists, woodwind and string players, chamber groups. Since 2014, in addition to its conventional concerts, it has offered a semi-annual Saturday-morning series, Music Inside Out, in which a single major quartet is discussed and performed. It has travelled around Vancouver Island, but also to Vancouver, Montreal, the U.S. and Turkey. It has performed at festivals and had residencies at the Banff Centre and at Stanford University.
In 2011 it released a CD, Hidden Treasure, comprising works by Kodály, Tavener and the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun. (Büyükçelen is Turkish, and met Saygun as a budding performer in Istanbul.) In 2014, it recorded chamber versions of Chopin’s concertos with local pianist Lorraine Min.
The quartet has also done much to honour the local painter for whom it is named. It has performed works that pay homage to her, such as Jean Coulthard’s Pines of Emily Carr, and has incorporated her writings into some concerts, most notably in a summer series held at Emily Carr House in 2006, 2012 and 2014. In 2011, as part of the Victoria Symphony’s Emily Carr Project, it participated in the première of Stories from Klee Wyck, by local composer Tobin Stokes.
It boasts a catholic and growing repertoire, including much standard repertoire from the 18th and 19th centuries, many 20th-century classics — Janácek, Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Shostakovich, Britten, Barber, Cage, Crumb, Pärt, Ligeti — and some less conventional fare, such as cross-cultural music, jazz and tango.
It is also devoted to contemporary music, and has commissioned three works from Canadian composers, inspired by Carr’s work. The first was Stokes’s Feathers, in 2014. The other two were 10th-anniversary commissions: Jocelyn Morlock’s Big Raven, performed in October, and Strangled by Growth, by Jared Miller, which will have its première on Monday.
Miller, a pianist as well as a composer, was born in Los Angeles in 1988, but raised in Vancouver, and did his undergraduate work at UBC. He is both the Victoria Symphony’s composer-in-residence and a doctoral fellow in composition at the Juilliard School, in New York.
Strangled by Growth draws on Carr’s powerful painting of the same name from 1931, now in the Vancouver Art Gallery. It depicts a ferocious-looking totem pole partly obscured by trees rendered abstractly, as wildly swirling ribbons of green.
Miller says he was captivated by the “seamless integration” and “lively interaction” of human and natural forces in Carr’s painting. He sought to evoke this musically by employing unconventional string-playing techniques within a structure that begins placidly but “becomes increasingly wild.”
(He will speak about his piece before the concert.)
Also on Monday, the quartet will join forces, for the first time, with the Lafayette String Quartet, longtime artists-in-residence at the University of Victoria. Together, they will perform the 16-year-old Mendelssohn’s popular, sunny Octet as well as Shostakovich’s much darker, more abrasive Two Pieces, Op. 11, from 1925.
The quartet will also collaborate with the Croatian-born accordion virtuoso Jelena Milojevic, who has lived here since 2009 while maintaining an international concert career. They will perform two of the best-known pieces by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, Adiós Nonino and Libertango.
What: Emily Carr String Quartet: 10th Anniversary Gala Concert
When/where: Monday, 7:30 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria); pre-concert talk at 6:45
Tickets: $35, students free. Ivy’s Bookshop or online at eventbrite.com