These days, the concert calendar is exceptionally busy, as various ensembles bring regular-season programming to an end in advance of December’s holiday-music glut.
On Saturday (Nov. 23), for instance, the Early Music Society of the Islands will sponsor an appearance by Accademia Hermans, an acclaimed, much-recorded Italian ensemble founded in 2000 (8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$25/$23, student rush $8; pre-concert talk 7:10; earlymusicsocietyofthe islands.ca).
Three members of the ensemble (flute, cello, harpsichord) will offer an intimate chamber-music concert, focusing on the early-18th-century Roman school, of which Arcangelo Corelli was the greatest and most influential figure. The program comprises sonatas and concertos by Corelli, Pietro Locatelli and two others (both probably pupils of Corelli) who eventually settled in London, Pietro Castrucci and Francesco Geminiani. (Castrucci led Handel’s opera orchestra there for more than 20 years.)
Two Corelli concertos will be heard in late-18th-century harpsichord arrangements by an Englishman, Thomas Billington.
On Sunday (Nov. 24), the Victoria Baroque Ensemble, enriched with trumpet and woodwinds, will celebrate the coming of Advent, joined by the St. John’s Chamber Singers and five vocal soloists (7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine, $30/$25/$5; victoria-baroque.com).
The concert will feature two grand works: Bach’s Cantata 147, which includes a popular movement based on the chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and the rarely performed Missa sapitentiae by Antonio Lotti (1666-1740), a German-born Italian who worked in Venice. Bach thought highly enough of this Mass to copy and perform it in Leipzig; Handel, too, copied it, and indeed it was long attributed to him.
There will be two contemporary-music programs of note in the coming week, one by the Emily Carr String Quartet (tonight, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. Mary of the Incarnation, Metchosin; Sunday, 2:30 p.m., St. Paul’s United Church, Sidney; Tues., Nov. 26, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine; $25, students free; emilycarrstringquartet.com).
The ECSQ is paying tribute to the Kronos Quartet, an adventurous ensemble founded in Seattle in 1973 and renowned for its huge repertoire of contemporary music (it has given hundreds of premières). The program mostly comprises works recorded by Kronos, by Arvo Pärt, Astor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Golijov and, most notably, Steve Reich — his Different Trains, a moving Holocaust memorial for string quartet and tape, written for Kronos in 1988.
The program also includes the première of Beloved of the Sky by Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi, written especially for the ECSQ and inspired by Emily Carr’s paintings.
On Saturday, the Victoria Symphony’s four-concert series Under the Northern Lights will continue with an Explorations program of works written in the past decade, conducted by Bill Linwood (8 p.m., Dave Dunnet Community Theatre, $20-$25; victoriasymphony.ca).
In addition to works by Canadian composers Christopher Mayo and Jennifer Butler, the concert will feature the première of Confluence, in which music by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Marcus Goddard, accompanies a film by the eclectic artist Lindsay Dobbin. The film is set where Dobbin lives, in Mi’kmaq territory on the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, and deals with the meeting of fresh and salt water in a tidal river that carries seawater in and out of a marsh.
The second half of the concert will be devoted to the North American première of another multimedia work, Manyworlds (2010), by two Norwegians: composer Rolf Wallin (whose work is familiar to Victoria through the Aventa Ensemble, which Linwood directs) and video artist Boya Bøckmann.
Wallin, who describes his orchestral music as “sculptures in sound and time,” was inspired by the many-worlds theory, which posits the existence of a large (possibly infinite) number of parallel universes. Manyworlds, he writes, explores the idea of “parallel musics” in which “every music contains the seed of all the other musics.”
And there is still more this weekend, including an all-Bach program by the Victoria Chamber Orchestra, on Friday (victoriachamberorchestra.org), and three events on Saturday: another in a series of nonet programs from the DieMahler Ensemble, conducted by George Corwin (diemahlerenterprises.com); the Linden Singers, performing Haydn’s late “Lord Nelson” Mass and a Vespers setting by Mozart (lindensingers.ca); and a day-long musical open house at Christ Church Cathedral in honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (christchurchcathedral.bc.ca).
