The Early Music Society of the Islands and Christ Church Cathedral have joined forces to sponsor what EMSI is rightly classifying as a “special event”: an appearance by the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, which comprises 32 voices (Saturday March 23, 8 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, $40/$35/$30/$10; pre-concert talk 7:10; earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca).
Founded in 1972, it is now one of the world’s leading university choirs, and its alumni include celebrated musicians on the order of John Rutter, John Tavener, Nico Muhly and Roger Norrington. The choir’s duties at Cambridge University are augmented by international concert tours, broadcasting and recording (it has released more than 40 CDs). It is currently on a tour of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
The centrepiece of Saturday’s concert will be a late-Renaissance masterpiece: the Requiem by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), the greatest Spanish composer of his day and the creator of an impressive body of Catholic church music.
The Requiem was published in 1605 as part of an Office for the Dead composed two years earlier on the death of the Dowager Empress María, the Spanish king’s sister, whom Victoria had served for two decades as a chaplain and musician at Madrid.
On Saturday, the Requiem will be interwoven with Spanish and English Passiontide motets, by Victoria, Tallis, Byrd and others.
The Victoria Symphony, in its Masterworks series, is offering up Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in a novel way, as part of the local première of a performance project known as Naked Classics (Sunday March 24, 2:30 p.m.; Monday March 25, 8 p.m.; Royal Theatre; $33-$86; victoriasymphony.ca).
Naked Classics, launched in 2007, is the brainchild of Paul Rissmann, a Scottish-born composer and writer who specializes in presenting classical music in concert in innovative and accessible ways, to audiences of all kinds and ages and in wide-ranging circumstances. He holds a position as “animateur” with the London Symphony Orchestra, though mounts diverse concert ventures all over the world.
A Naked Classics program is at once educational and entertaining. In the first half, Rissmann discusses and dissects a single major work in depth, in a presentation that includes projection of digital images and musical examples played by the orchestra. After intermission, the complete work is performed.
The Symphonie fantastique (1830), a quintessential specimen of musical Romanticism, is perfect for the Naked Classics approach, given its fascinating biographical and historical contexts, its vivid (occasionally delirious) program, its plentiful musical riches and novelties, and its profound influence on later composers.
The symphony, Berlioz wrote, relates “various episodes in the life of an artist” (himself, of course), focusing on a doomed infatuation. He was 26 when he composed it, and an ardent Romantic whose fervid imagination teemed with new ideas absorbed from many artistic and literary sources in which Romanticism stirred. He wrote the music “furiously,” with “fire and tears,” his mind “boiling over” — and it shows.
The outlines of the Classical symphony are still perceptible in the Symphonie fantastique, and specific models are occasionally apparent, yet it is a work of astonishing originality, unfettered by rules. Form, melody, harmony, syntax, sonority — all are radically reconceived in the service of expressing the emotional, psychological and pictorial implications of the program.
The result was a new kind of symphony, a new conception of instrumental program music and, most obviously, a new approach to orchestration.
Next Wednesday, March 27, the Victoria Symphony’s three-concert New Music Festival will begin with a performance by the Emily Carr String Quartet (8 p.m., Dave Dunnet Community Theatre, $25, festival pass $40; victoriasymphony.ca, emilycarrstringquartet.com).
The ECSQ will perform the String Quartet No. 2 (Waves) by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer; works by two former composers-in-residence of the Victoria Symphony, Tobin Stokes and Jared Miller; and the première of One More Way to See, by Vancouver-based composer Jennifer Butler.
The latter, which will also feature mezzo-soprano Marion Newman, is the second part of Butler’s ongoing cycle Songs for Klee Wyck, commissioned by the ECSQ and inspired by poetry about Emily Carr. (The first part, Klee Wyck Woman, had its première in 2017.)
One More Way to See is based on a poem by Stephanie McKenzie, who will read it at Wednesday’s concert.
