What: Victoria Symphony (Classics Series): Haydn and Mozart
When/where: Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Farquhar Auditorium (University Centre, University of Victoria)
Tickets: $32-$52. Call 250-721-8480 or 250-385-6515; online at tickets.uvic.ca; in person at the UVic Ticket Centre and the Victoria Symphony Box Office (Suite 610, 620 View St.)
What: DieMahler Chamber Music Series: Mozart-Telemann
When/where: Saturday, 2:30 p.m., Church of St. Mary the Virgin (1701 Elgin Rd.)
Tickets: $25, seniors $22.50, students by donation. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at Ivy’s Bookshop and the RMTS (McPherson) box office
A season rarely goes by without the Victoria Symphony programming at least one of Haydn’s 104 symphonies, and only a fiend would complain about that.
Recent seasons have included works drawn from throughout this immensely rich repertoire: Nos. 6-8 (Times of the Day), No. 26 (Lamentatione), No. 45 (Farewell), No. 76, No. 88, No. 91 and several of the late London Symphonies (Nos. 97, 98 and 101, the Clock). And there have been other works by Haydn, too — the Sinfonia concertante, concertos, overtures, operatic arias.
This season, the orchestra is offering a whole Haydn festival stretched across the five concerts of its Classics Series, the fourth of which falls on Sunday. So far, we have heard three popular nicknamed symphonies — Nos. 82 (Bear), 94 (Surprise) and 22 (Philosopher) — as well as two concertos. Still to come, in April, are a violin concerto and the Farewell Symphony.
(The latter, self-evidently, is the perfect choice for a finale to the festival, even though the Victoria Symphony performed it as recently as 2014.)
Sunday’s program offers the most interesting and varied of the five programs. The entrée, the Symphony No. 80 in D Minor, from 1784, is not one of Haydn’s greatest hits, but it is full of splendid things.
Look no further than the first movement, which works out a conflict between two utterly divergent elements: tuneless, minor-key storm-and-stress music and a goofy little country dance. (Guess who wins.)
The program also includes three excerpts from the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words, one of Haydn’s greatest works. Composed about 1785, it is an extraordinary sequence of seven meditative slow movements, one corresponding to each of the last utterances of the crucified Christ, bracketed by a grave introduction and a furious finale depicting the earthquake that followed Christ’s death.
(The work proved so popular that Haydn made several arrangements of it. His string-quartet version was performed here in 2015.)
To conclude the concert, the orchestra will join the chamber choir Vox Humana in Haydn’s Te Deum setting from 1800, part of that great series of sacred choral works (including six masses and two oratorios) that he wrote between 1796 and 1802, when he was in his 60s. (Quite a few of these works have been performed here in recent years.)
The program will open with an overture by Mozart, and the excerpts from The Seven Last Words will be mingled with four short sacred choral works by Mozart, including the gorgeous motet Ave verum corpus, composed in 1791, the year of his death.
No excuse is needed to rope together these two great contemporaries and mutual admirers, but here’s one: On March 13, 1785, a concert of the Musicians’ Society of Vienna included Haydn’s Symphony No. 80, and the organizer of that concert was Mozart.
Sunday’s concert will have one of Canada’s most distinguished early-music practitioners as its guest conductor, Ivars Taurins. A founding member of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, in Toronto, Taurins was its principal violist for 23 years. He also founded, in 1981, the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, which he still directs.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the death of Georg Philipp Telemann and, already this season, the milestone has been acknowledged in the programming of local early-music organizations including the Luchkow-Jarvis Duo, the Victoria Baroque Players, the Early Music Society of the Islands and the Pacific Baroque Festival.
The attention has been welcome, allowing us to sample generously from the ridiculously prolific output of this highly skilled, innovative and extraordinarily versatile composer, and allowing him, for once, to emerge from the shadow of his greatest contemporaries, Bach and Handel.
And we are not done yet with Telemann. On Saturday, the annual chamber-music series of the DieMahler Ensemble, founded and directed by violinist Pablo Diemecke, will continue with a program including two concertos for strings by Telemann, one of them inspired by his contact with Polish folk musicians.
The concert, featuring flutist Ceci Valdés and a string quartet led by Diemecke, will also include a string quartet Mozart wrote in his teens as well as flute quartets by Haydn and Mozart.
