On Saturday, the Victoria Choral Society will present the B.C. première of This Thirsty Land, by Leonard Enns, a composer based in Waterloo, Ont. (8 p.m., Farquhar Auditorium, University of Victoria Centre, $35/$10; victoriachoralsociety.ca).
The five-movement, 25-minute work, first performed in 2018, draws on texts from Aeschylus, St. Francis of Assisi, T.S. Eliot and George Whipple, in the service of an environmentalist theme. “This Thirsty Land celebrates the gift of water, and mourns the possibility of a future that may result if we do not attend to it, if we care too much about ourselves and too little about the Earth,” Enns writes. “This is a celebration, and also a cry for help and forgiveness.”
The VCS will also perform two pieces created especially for this concert by local composer Tobin Stokes, and Schubert’s Mass in G Major, a modestly scaled but impressively accomplished work he composed when he was just 18.
More than 200 performers will participate on Saturday, with the VCS joined by two choirs from Oak Bay High School, three vocal soloists and an orchestra.
Two very different organ recitals will be given this weekend.
On Saturday, St. Barnabas Anglican Church will inaugurate a new early-music series to show off its tracker-action chamber organ, copied after German instruments from around 1620 (7:30 p.m., 1525 Begbie St., $20/$10; pre-concert talk 7 p.m.; stbarnabaschurch.ca).
The concert will feature Christina Hutten, a Vancouver-based organist with an international recital career. She has studied historical keyboard instruments in Europe and is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of British Columbia.
Her program includes music by J.S. Bach and 17th-century composers who influenced him, including Scheidemann, Pachelbel, Böhm and one of J.S.’s own ancestors, Heinrich Bach.
On Sunday, Christ Church Cathedral, partnering with the Royal Canadian College of Organists, will present a twilight recital by Jean-Willy Kunz, a native of France who is organist-in-residence with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (6 p.m., by donation; pre-concert talk 5:30 p.m.; christchurchcathedral.bc.ca).
Kunz will perform Bach and Debussy, some contemporary music, improvisations and his own transcription of Camille Saint-Saëns’s beloved Carnival of the Animals. (He made the transcription in 2014 to celebrate the inauguration of the Montreal Symphony’s new organ, and recorded it for an ATMA Classique CD released in 2017.)
On this occasion, Kunz will be joined by the popular author and broadcaster Bill Richardson, who will read his own set of humorous narrative poems tying together the various animal portraits comprising Saint-Saëns’s “grand zoological fantasy.”
The Victoria Symphony’s Masterworks concert on Sunday will launch a four-part series titled Under the Northern Lights, devoted to composers from northern climes, many of them from Scandinavia (2:30 p.m., Farquhar Auditorium, UVic Centre, $35-$58; victoriasymphony.ca).
Sunday’s concert, conducted by the orchestra’s music director, Christian Kluxen, will feature one of the greatest, most quintessential specimens of symphonic “northerliness”: Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5, a work powerfully redolent of Finnish landscapes.
The program opens with two contemporary works from Denmark, Kluxen’s homeland: Nordic Suite, a set of folk-song arrangements by the Danish String Quartet (here arranged for string orchestra); and Sound and Simplicity: Seven Pillars of Music for Accordion and Orchestra, by Poul Ruders.
The latter was co-commissioned by the Victoria Symphony and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, which gave the première in April in Copenhagen, where it proved to be a hit.
The featured soloist will by Danish accordionist Bjarke Mogensen, for whom the concerto was written and who has exclusive rights to it through 2023.
Finally, on Monday, two choirs will offer Remembrance Day concerts: the CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble (2 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, $25/$22/$10, veterans and under 13 free; capriccio.ca) and Via Choralis (2:30 p.m., St. Elizabeth’s Church, Sidney, $20/$5, under 13 free; viachoralis.ca).
For CapriCCio, it will be a momentous performance, falling 30 years to the day after its inaugural concert. (The choir is still directed by its founder, Michael Gormley.)
Monday’s program mostly comprises works by English, American and Canadian composers (including Brian Tate, one of CapriCCio’s baritones), plus a short, beautiful a cappella Requiem setting by Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901), an often underrated German composer especially admired for his sacred choral music.
