Four noteworthy concerts will take place in the coming days, three of them, alas, simultaneously, on Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
One of the Sunday concerts is the season launch for the Emily Carr String Quartet, at the Church of St. Mary of the Incarnation in Metchosin (4125 Metchosin Rd.). Fortunately, it will be repeated in Victoria on Wednesday, Sept. 20 (7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine, 1611 Quadra St.; $25, students free; emilycarrstringquartet.com).
The eclectic program includes one of Haydn’s last quartets, Op. 76/No. 5; Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, a challenging masterpiece from 1928; and Torino, a recent work by Salina Fisher, a young composer in New Zealand. “Torino” is a Maori word meaning “spiral,” and the work was inspired by a Maori instrument, the putorino.
Another Sunday afternoon event is a faculty concert at the University of Victoria, part of the School of Music’s busy 50th-anniversary season. The concert features tenor Benjamin Butterfield with pianist Kinza Tyrrell (Phillip T. Young Recital Hall; $25/$20/$10; streaming online in UVic’s Listen! Live program; finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar/events).
The diverse program includes Canadian folksongs, German lieder and songs from Russian and Ukraine, the latter being one of Butterfield’s passions. He has been involved from the beginning with the Toronto-based Ukrainian Art Song Project, which since 2004 has published, recorded and sponsored performances of songs by Ukrainian composers — a huge and rich repertoire. Butterfield has recorded Ukrainian songs, and he visited Ukraine last year.
Also on the program are songs by American composer Randy Newman — yes, he of Short People and You’ve Got a Friend in Me and all those movie scores. Butterfield is an ardent champion of Newman, insisting that he has been unjustly neglected as a serious purveyor of art songs and should appeal to classical performers. “Newman said he really wished that people with nice voices would sing his songs,” Butterfield says. “I’m working on it.”
Also on Sunday afternoon, Wentworth Villa, the beautiful old mansion (and architectural-heritage museum) at 1156 Fort St., will launch its second concert season with an appearance by Vancouver-based, internationally renowned pianist Jane Coop ($40, students $25; wentworthvilla.com). Coop retired in 2012 after more than three decades teaching at the University of British Columbia, and that same year she became a member of the Order of Canada.
She does not appear often in Victoria, and Sunday’s concert offers an extraordinary opportunity to hear her up close, as the Villa comfortably seats only about 85. Her hour-long program seems nicely judged to the space, comprising intimate works by Beethoven (Op. 33 bagatelles, “Moonlight” Sonata) and various short pieces by Rachmaninoff.
Finally, on Monday, the Victoria Symphony will offer a Masterworks concert to begin its first season under its new music director, conductor Christian Kluxen (8 p.m., Royal Theatre, 805 Broughton St.; $32-$85; victoriasymphony.ca).
Kluxen will launch his tenure with an ambitious program culminating in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, aptly named Titan. The orchestra will almost double in size, to 76, to perform this mighty masterwork, which runs almost an hour.
Monday’s program will open with the première of Buzzer Beater by Jared Miller, whose three-season tenure as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence ended earlier this year. The work was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in partnership with the Victoria Symphony. (The TSO will perform it on Sept. 28.)
Written to honour Canada’s 150th birthday, Buzzer Beater was sparked by Miller’s recollection that basketball was invented by a Canadian, and it “fuses a variety of music and real basketball sounds to depict the excitement of a game in its final two minutes.” Quite literally so: The work is two minutes long.
Also on the program is Ravel’s magnificent Piano Concerto in D Major for the Left Hand, and the soloist is a local favourite: Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear, who made his Victoria Symphony debut in 1993, as a teenage prodigy, and has returned often, most recently as a last-minute replacement on the orchestra’s opening night last September.
Among Goodyear’s accomplishments is performing all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas in a single day — so, even though he’ll be resting his right hand on Monday, nobody could accuse him of being lazy.
