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Classical Music: Baroque Fest goes beyond Bach

What: Pacific Baroque Festival: “How good and pleasant it is” — German Composers Before Bach When/where: Feb. 4 (11 a.m.), Feb. 5 and 6 (8 p.m.), Alix Goolden Hall; Feb. 4 (8 p.m.), Feb. 7 (4:30 p.m.), Christ Church Cathedral Tickets: Feb.

What: Pacific Baroque Festival: “How good and pleasant it is” — German Composers Before Bach
When/where: Feb. 4 (11 a.m.), Feb. 5 and 6 (8 p.m.), Alix Goolden Hall; Feb. 4 (8 p.m.), Feb. 7 (4:30 p.m.), Christ Church Cathedral
Tickets: Feb. 4, $25, seniors and students $20; Feb. 5 and 6, $30/$25; Feb. 7 free; festival passes $100/$80 (EMSI members $85/$65); free to Victoria Conservatory of Music students. Call 250-386-5311; online at ticketfly.com; in person at the conservatory and cathedral offices, Long & McQuade, Ivy’s Bookshop, Munro’s Books, and Tanner’s Books
Details: pacbaroque.com

 

The 12th Pacific Baroque Festival, which begins a week from today, is devoted to a rich repertoire that rarely gets its due: German music of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

“German music” here means “German music that is not by Bach or Handel.”

A few pieces by Bach do appear on one program; otherwise, the biggest names this year are Buxtehude, Froberger, Kuhnau and Pachelbel.

The bulk of the programming is taken up by 20 composers whose names are hardly household words, running from Ahle to Zachau and including Förtsch, Knüpfer, Pfleger, Reincken, Rosenmüller, Scheidt, Schein and Vierdanck.

(There are a few non-Germans, too, including Bononcini and Sweelinck.)

Some of these German composers had an impact on the careers and music of Bach and Handel, it is true, but they are being showcased here because of their own considerable merits.

Indeed, these supposedly minor figures produced music that is often extraordinarily beautiful and expressive, technically intricate and ingenious, and stylistically distinctive.

Hearing a lot of this music in a concentrated period should be a revelation — a window onto a whole musical culture.

Structurally, the festival is unchanged this year: five concerts spread over four days, with wide-ranging programs performed by well-known early-music specialists from Victoria, Vancouver and elsewhere.

The opening concert, an intimate program of keyboard, chamber and vocal music next Thursday morning, features the highly regarded Canadian soprano Linda Tsatsanis and a quartet of instrumentalists — two violins, lute and keyboards.

The program is symptomatic of the refreshing insistence on unfamiliar repertoire this year, as it includes two pieces by Pachelbel, neither one of which is his popular Canon — and good riddance.

Next Thursday evening, Christ Church Cathedral’s big, splendid Hellmuth Wolff organ, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, will get a fine workout in a program of German and Dutch music dating back to the late 16th century and culminating in Bach’s mighty Passacaglia in C Minor.

The performer is a rising star: 24-year-old French organist Emmanuel Arakélian, who is a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, in Paris.

Arakélian has a special interest in historical instruments and performance issues, and his program is partly concerned to show the influence of ancient rhetoric on German Baroque music.

The two other evening concerts, next Friday and Saturday, both feature German soprano Dorothee Mields, who is renowned as an interpreter of just the sort of music on offer this year.

As a British reviewer wrote in 2013: “No present-day singer understands German sacred music of the 17th century better than the soprano Dorothee Mields and, unsurprisingly therefore, no one sings it better.”

Both concerts, which also feature American baritone Sumner Thompson, will be led by the festival’s artistic director, violinist Marc Destrubé, a Victoria native who enjoys a busy international career, and the house band, the Pacific Baroque Festival Ensemble, who are mostly members of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, which is based (like Destrubé) in Vancouver.

Both programs include an interesting, variegated mix of instrumental and sacred vocal music, though the Saturday concert is a somewhat grander affair, also including local tenor Benjamin Butterfield, the Victoria Children’s Choir and the St. Christopher Singers, one of Christ Church’s resident choirs.

As usual, the festival will conclude with an expanded Sunday-afternoon Choral Evensong service at Christ Church, featuring the St. Christopher Singers, the instrumental ensemble and organist Michael Gormley, the cathedral’s director of music.

The program is devoted to sacred choral and organ music in the Lutheran tradition, the sort of repertoire in which German Baroque composers particularly excelled.

This year, incidentally, as an “upbeat” to the festival, an additional chamber concert is being offered as a kind of primer on 17th-century German music, though without repeating any repertoire from the five main concerts.

Destrubé and three other instrumentalists will be joined by the fine local soprano Rebecca Genge, who is studying historical performance at the University of Toronto, with countertenor Daniel Taylor.

This program will be performed tonight in Christ Church’s Chapel of New Jerusalem (7:30, $25/$20), and will be repeated, in equally intimate venues, in Metchosin (Friday) and Parksville (Saturday).

For details, visit pacbaroque.com.