Kevin Bazzana column: More to holiday music than Messiah

Times Colonist
December 12, 2012

Most prominent among the classical holiday-music concerts this weekend are the Victoria Symphony’s annual pair of performances of Handel’s Messiah, and its concert with singer-songwriter and pianist Chantal Kreviazuk Saturday evening. But in the final week-or-so before the Big Day, there are many other concerts of note, offering a considerable range of repertoire.

Also on Saturday, the Victoria Philharmonic Choir will offer its annual Family Christmas Carol Sing-Along, this year at a new location: the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (7 p.m.; $20/$10, 12 and under free). Among the choir’s guest performers this year will be Jeremy Bowes, a Victoria-born bass who earned a master’s degree at Yale in 2010 and whose international career has included two seasons with the Saxon State Opera in Dresden, Germany. (He will sing, inevitably, the rousing The Trumpet Shall Sound, from Messiah.)

§00020000067E000005B5678,The CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble, too, offers an annual holiday concert, which in past seasons has been given very close to Christmas Day but this year falls a little earlier, on Friday, Dec. 21 — hence its title, ’Twas Not the Night Before Christmas (7:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral; $25/$22/$10, 12 and under free). As usual, the choir will be joined by a brass ensemble in a generous, centuries-spanning program of carols and other pertinent pieces, in arrangements from a wide variety of sources.

Some of the most interesting and novel holiday music comes from early-music groups, and this year there are several such programs to recommend, beginning Saturday with the annual Christmas concert sponsored by the Early Music Society of the Islands (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall; $27/$24/$20/$8).

Titled Buon Natale y Felices Fiestas, the concert features El Mundo, a period-instrument chamber ensemble from San Francisco, directed by guitarist and lutenist Richard Savino, that specializes in music of Italy, Spain, and Latin America from the 16th through 19th centuries.

Two sopranos and six instrumentalists — an interesting combination of bowed and plucked strings, percussion, and continuo — will appear in Saturday’s program, which includes seasonally appropriate sacred and secular music in many genres (motet, villancico, sonata, toccata, fandango, folia), most of it from the 17th century. The Italians on the program are mostly familiar (Monteverdi, Piccinini, Legrenzi, Corelli), though among the Spaniards and Latin Americans are some refreshingly obscure names like Santiago de Murcia, José de Orejón y Aparicio, and Rafael Antonio Castellanos.

§0002000004EB00000C2D4E5,On Sunday, the popular women’s choir Ensemble Laude will offer its annual winter concert, this year titled The Banquet and promising “a seasoned offering of choral song” (3 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall; by donation). Reflecting Laude’s twin specialties in very early and contemporary multicultural repertoire, the program will include chants, songs, and wassails from Medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as pieces from India, Argentina, Nigeria, and elsewhere, including our own First Nations. The highlight promises to be the première of Festum Carmen, a 12-part piece composed especially for this concert by Laude’s founder and artistic director, soprano Elizabeth MacIsaac.

(The Banquet will be repeated Jan. 13, at 3 p.m., at the Church of the Advent, in Colwood.)

The local holiday-music season continues after the Big Day, incidentally. Since 2010, for instance, the duo Les Amusements de la Chambre, comprising violinist Emily Redhead and pianist and harpsichordist Katelyn Clark — both from Victoria, now based in Montreal — has been performing at Craigdarroch Castle in the week following Christmas. This year, it will appear there Dec. 28, at 11 a.m., in an hour-long program of 18th- and early-19th-century music (free with castle admission).

§0002000004EC000011124E6,The end of our holiday-music season has lately been marked by the Victoria Symphony’s Viennese New Year’s concert Jan. 1, (2:30 p.m., Royal Theatre; $45-$85). Inspired by the beloved, televised New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, it offers instrumental and vocal bonbons by the Strauss family and other composers associated with the Viennese tradition. This year, as usual, the orchestra will be joined by members of Ballet Victoria as well as vocal soloists: soprano Charlotte Corwin and tenor Ken Lavigne.

And, for the first time, the concert will be led by Timothy Vernon, who is ideally suited to the task. As a conducting student during his teens and twenties, he spent a decade based in Vienna. For more details about these concerts, visit victoriasymphony.ca, vpchoir.squarespace.com, capriccio.ca, earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca, ensemblelaude.org, amusementsdelachambre.com and thecastle.ca.