Victoria Summer Music Festival: Season Launch Concert, with Martin Kuuskmann, bassoon; Arthur Rowe, piano; and the Emily Carr String Quartet
When/where: May 22, 7:30 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, UVic); pre-concert talk at 6:40 p.m.
Tickets: $30, students $10 (in advance only). Call 250-383-9555; online at vsmf.org/boxoffice; in person at Ivy’s Bookshop
The 18th Victoria Summer Music Festival (July 23 to Aug. 8; vsmf.org) will comprise six concerts — a number it has equalled or surpassed only twice in its history. Five concerts has been typical in recent years, but attendance has improved so much lately that a longer series can be justified. (Many concerts sell out.)
Actually, the VSMF will offer seven concerts this year; the first of them will be given next Wednesday as early promotion for the main series. But it is not a preview of coming attractions; nothing on the program will be repeated in the summer.
The concert marks the return to Victoria of Estonian-born, Seattle-based bassoon virtuoso Martin Kuuskmann, who made his VSMF debut in 2010. The previous year, he had encountered pianist Arthur Rowe, the UVic professor who is the VSMF’s music director, at a festival on the San Juan Islands, and an invitation to Victoria was the result. Kuuskmann has since performed elsewhere, too, with Rowe, and with one of Rowe’s UVic colleagues, clarinetist Patricia Kostek.
“We were blown away by Martin’s performance in 2010, and have been trying to engage him for a return visit ever since,” says Marilyn Dalzell, the VSMF’s president. “But he’s in such great demand.”
A bassoon soloist in great demand might sound like an oxymoron, but in fact bassoonists with successful international solo careers are hardly unknown. (One of them, George Zukerman, who retired last year at age 85, has lived in the Vancouver area since 1953.) Moreover, there is a vast and venerable repertoire of chamber and orchestral music for solo bassoon, including 39 concertos by Vivaldi, concertos by Mozart and Weber, and a particularly large body of music by 20th- and 21st-century composers.
Kuuskmann is an interesting, multifaceted performer with catholic tastes and a fondness for erasing boundaries — a musician who plays whatever he likes, and seems willing to try anything. “I like to mix things up,” he says. “I like to play everything.”
He appears in traditional concerto and chamber-music concerts but also in more avant-garde events featuring electronic or multimedia elements, and he enjoys improvising in public. He plays standard repertoire but also a huge range of modern fare, including works influenced by jazz, rock, electronica and world music (one of his CDs includes chanting by Tibetan monks). He has worked closely with composers and has premièred many new works, including the eight concertos that have been written for him (more are in progress).
In his 2010 appearance in the VSMF, Kuuskmann joined Rowe and Kostek in chamber music by Beethoven and Schumann. Next Wednesday, however, he will draw from the two ends of his repertoire, in a characteristically varied and eclectic program. And he will presumably introduce that program himself: He says he enjoys getting to know his audience by speaking from the stage.
The early-music component will be his own arrangement of a Bach oboe concerto (BWV 1059) that was reconstructed by modern scholars from fragmentary sources. (The results are wholly convincing, judging from his recording of the concerto, released last year.) In Wednesday’s performance, the string parts will be played by the Emily Carr String Quartet, it being perfectly acceptable to render a Baroque concerto as chamber rather than orchestral music.
Kuuskmann will also join the quartet for one his favourite works, the tango Oblivion by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and the quartet alone will perform two short works: Piazzolla’s wildly intense Four, for Tango, and Commedia dell’arte I, by Serbian-Canadian composer Ana Sokolovic.
In the second half of the program, Kuuskmann will perform three more contemporary works, two of them by fellow Estonians: the unaccompanied Song to a Distant Friend, by Tõnu Kõrvits; and Arvo Pärt’s tender, disarmingly simple-sounding Spiegel im Spiegel, a popular early specimen of his trademark “tintinnabular” style. Rowe will accompany Kuuskmann in the latter, and in a dynamic, sometimes raucous bassoon sonata by Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-American composer.
I told you he was interesting.
