This season, the Victoria Symphony’s Explorations Series, which is devoted to contemporary music, has been curated and conducted by Bill Linwood, its principal timpanist, and the programming has been unusually rich and adventurous, as a result. That is no surprise: Linwood also directs the Aventa Ensemble, the city’s premier new-music group.
On Saturday, the Explorations Series will close with a diverse and substantial program culminating in a highly dramatic symphony that the American composer John Adams extracted from his 2005 opera Doctor Atomic (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $20/$15; victoriasymphony.ca). The opera, set at Los Alamos and Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, deals with the preparations for, and the moral debates around, the first atomic-bomb test, and includes physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer among its main characters.
The Doctor Atomic Symphony runs about 25 minutes and comprises three movements played without breaks: The Laboratory, a short quasi-overture conjuring up a post-nuclear landscape; Panic, a lengthy evocation of the electrical storm that lashes the test site and the frenzied activity leading up to the test; and Trinity, about the site itself.
The other big work on Saturday’s program is Memorial to Martin Luther King (1968), by Canadian composer Oskar Morawetz. It was commissioned in 1966 by the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who said, “Don’t write a concerto, or a work with the usual form or content, or with the standard-sized orchestra.” Morawetz struggled with the commission until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, which gave him the inspiration he needed.
Saturday’s performance will pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of that tragedy.
The music is varied and emotionally charged, and is indeed unconventionally scored, with the orchestra comprising woodwinds, brass, percussion, harp and keyboards; the only string instrument is the solo cello, which suggests a kind of dignified “voice.” A single movement running about 20 minutes, the work depicts the end of King’s life — the Freedom March in Memphis, Tennessee, the fatal gunshot, the funeral procession — and draws on the spiritual Free at Last, which King quoted in his famous “I have a dream” speech.
The soloist on Saturday will be the Victoria Symphony’s principal cellist, Brian Yoon.
The orchestra will also première a new work: Flocking for Orchestra, by Linda Bouchard, a Quebec-born composer based in San Francisco. (It was commissioned through the Victoria Foundation’s Hugh Davidson Fund.) The “flocking” in question refers to the co-ordinating flight of birds, which Bouchard sought to simulate musically.
The program opens with Earthfall (2015), by Jocelyn Morlock, composer-in-residence with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
(Morlock just won the 2018 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year for My Name is Amanda Todd, which the Victoria Symphony will perform on Nov. 10.)
There are also forthcoming choral concerts of note, beginning this weekend, when the Sooke Philharmonic will give its first concerts since the death, on Feb. 23, of its founder and longtime music director, Norman Nelson (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Sooke Community Hall; Sunday, 3 p.m., Our Lady of the Rosary Church, Langford; $25/$20, under 16 free; sookephil.ca).
The Sooke Philharmonic Chorus and Chamber Players will be led by their regular conductor, Nicholas Fairbank, in two big, popular works: Mozart’s “Coronation” Mass (1779) and the set of four anthems Handel composed in 1727 for the coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline. Among the latter is the stirring Zadok the Priest, which has been performed at every British coronation since.
And next Tuesday, April 10, at Christ Church Cathedral, we will have a rare opportunity to hear a top British collegiate choir: the Choir of Royal Holloway, from the University of London (7:30 p.m., $20/$5; christchurchcathedral.bc.ca). Founded in 1886 and very highly regarded, this 24-member choir tours widely and has recorded for Hyperion, Decca, Naxos and other labels.
Tuesday’s program, Around the World in 80 Minutes, is a musical journey that begins and ends in England, but passes through many other countries: France, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the United States. The centuries-spanning line-up of 18 composers ranges from Byrd and Buxtehude to Vaughan Williams and Holst to Rautavaara and Pärt.
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