What: Les Amusements de la Chambre: Pleasure Gardens.
When/where: Sunday, 7:30 p.m., Church of Truth (111 Superior St.)
Tickets: $20, seniors $15, students $10. Online at amusementsdelachambre.com; in person at Ivy’s Bookshop.
What: Galiano Ensemble — America’s Late Romantics.
When/where: Wednesday, May 28, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria).
Tickets: $33, seniors $30. Call 250-704-2580; e-mail galianoensemble@gmail.com; in person at Ivy’s Bookshop and Munro Books.
On Sunday, Les Amusements de la Chambre — the duo comprising violinist Emily Redhead and harpsichordist Katelyn Clark — will bring to a close their current series of three “salon concerts,” under the big, resonant peaked ceiling of the Church of Truth, in James Bay.
Redhead and Clark, both of whom grew up here, formed their duo in 2010 and now divide their time between Victoria and Montreal. Since last year, their appearances here have mostly been inspired by the private recitals that were once commonplace in salons and other small venues in major European cities. Their inaugural salon series was offered in the first half of 2013; their second began in September.
Sunday’s concert pays homage to pleasure gardens, open-air venues that offered vocal and instrumental music and other forms of entertainment and recreation as well as light refreshment. From the mid-17th century into modern times, pleasure gardens were among the most popular diversions for the public, first in England, later in colonial America and Canada. (There were equivalents outside the English-speaking world, too — the Prater in Vienna, for instance.)
The program comprises rarely heard 17th- and 18th-century suites and sonatas by English and German composers — three very different Baroque masters (Purcell, Pachelbel, Froberger) plus two early exponents of what became the Classical style, Thomas Arne and Johann Christian Bach, J.S.’s youngest son. (He was known as the “English Bach” or “London Bach” — there were a lot of Bachs to keep straight.) Arne, for many years, wrote music (particularly songs) especially for London’s pleasure gardens, the best known of which was the Vauxhall.
In several pieces on Sunday, the duo will be augmented by local violinist Hannah Burton, who worked with them in two French Baroque programs last year.
Les Amusements de la Chambre specializes in early music but champions new music, too, and Sunday’s concert will close with a première: with our shadows, by local composer Daniel Brandes, founder of the contemporary-music series A Place to Listen.
This “very intimate and personal” piece, Brandes says, is scored for “one sustaining instrument and one decaying instrument,” each of which freely explores its own idiomatic part, “alone but always sensitive and attentive to the other’s presence” — he uses the term “two-gether” to describe this relationship.
Incidentally, Pleasure Gardens, like the duo’s last salon concert, in January, will also be given in the Agricultural Hall on Mayne Island (Saturday, 3 p.m., same prices).
The Galiano Ensemble, a string group with a dozen core members, has always had a soft spot for English music, particularly the folk-tinged, “pastoral” music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry, Bridge and so on. Composers such as these produced a distinctive and gorgeous late-Romantic repertoire for strings, and the Galiano, under the baton of its founder and music director, violist Yariv Aloni, performs this music with particular conviction, tonal beauty and expressive fervour.
The Galiano’s only CD, in fact, is a program of English music recorded in concert in 2001, and since that year the ensemble has made an annual tradition of devoting one of its three concerts to this repertoire. It will break from this tradition next Wednesday, however, in its final concert of the season, which will be devoted not to English but to American music. But the break is perhaps more apparent than real, since the warm late-Romantic idiom of this American music has much in common with English repertoire of the same period.
The program comprises three lovely multi-movement works composed between 1889 and 1907, all of which count as refreshingly obscure. The curtain-raiser is the comparatively short, three-movement Suite in E Major, Op. 63, by Arthur Foote — a work that enjoyed considerable popularity in the composer’s lifetime.
The other works are more substantial, each running about 25 minutes: George Chadwick’s four-movement Serenade in F Major, and Victor Herbert’s five-movement Serenade, Op. 12, the frequent jauntiness of which reminds us that Herbert was best known for his operettas. (He was himself a cellist, and his Cello Concerto No. 2 is still performed.)
Enjoy the Americana while it lasts, anyway: The Galiano Ensemble’s 2014-15 season will once again include an English program, in January.