What: Summer Organ Series
When/where: June 14, 21 and 28, 7:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral
Tickets: $15, series $35. In person at the cathedral office (930 Burdett Ave.), Ivy’s Bookshop, Munro’s Books
What: A Place to Listen: Colin Tilney, harpsichord
When/where: June 19, 7 p.m., James Bay United Church (517 Michigan St.)
Tickets: Suggested donation $10, students and artists $5.
Christ Church Cathedral will launch its sixth Summer Organ Series Friday night, and will continue on the subsequent two Fridays. This series was created to showcase the cathedral’s splendid Hellmuth Wolff organ — the city’s largest, completed in 2005 at a cost of more than $2 million — and the instrument has indeed proved to be a magnet, attracting distinguished performers from around the world.
This year’s series will be launched by Michael Gormley, who has been Christ Church’s organist and director of music since 1984. Gormley has been absent from the series in recent years, and to celebrate his return he will offer an all-Bach program, comprising preludes and fugues, chorale preludes, the mighty C-minor passacaglia, and other works. “I wanted to play familiar repertoire,” he says, adding, “Bach works very well on the Wolff organ because of its great clarity of sound. You can hear the counterpoint perfectly, which is not always a given on most organs.”
The June 21 recital will feature the English-born Edward Norman, who was organist and choir director at Church of St. John the Divine from 1974 to 1978 and has lived in Vancouver since 2011. Norman has performed at Christ Church many times over the years, though never on the Wolff organ.
“I designed the program to explore the rich tonal range of this instrument, from its majestic ‘full organ’ to its delightful quieter colours,” he says. He will play works by Couperin, Bach, Mozart and Vierne, but also “slightly off-the-beaten-track” modern repertoire, including some “jazz-style chorale preludes.”
The June 28 recital will mark the Victoria debut of Christian Lane, who has been associate university choirmaster and organist at Harvard University since 2008 and won the Canadian International Organ Competition in 2011. Lane, too, will offer a wide-ranging program, including Buxtehude and Mendelssohn but also modern works, two of which were composed for him by a colleague at Harvard, Carson Cooman. Though he will be new to Christ Church’s organ, Lane notes that “my colleagues who have played it all speak highly of it.”
In April, I attended a private fundraising recital by the renowned English-born harpsichordist Colin Tilney, who has lived here since 2002. He played Scarlatti and Bach for a few dozen people in the living room of a house on Ten Mile Point, and the setting seemed perfectly suited to both the instrument and the repertoire. Tilney’s next performance, on June 19, will be open to the public but will take place in similarly cosy surroundings — charming James Bay United Church — as part of a series, A Place to Listen, specifically devoted to intimate music-making.
The series was founded by composer Daniel Brandes, 27, who holds a master’s degree in music from the University of Victoria, and he describes its mandate as “exploring the relationships between sound and silence, audience and performer, performer and score.”
The emphasis is on creating a “quiet place” to help the audience penetrate more deeply into the music. “Rather than a concert series, this is a listening series,” Brandes says, and it is certainly welcome given what he rightly calls “our current culture of hyper-stimulation and saturation.”
A Place to Listen was launched in October and has offered seven concerts to date, all of contemporary experimental music and including a number of premières. Most of the music has been drawn from Wandelweiser, an international community of musicians and other artists particularly interested in “exploring the use[s] of silence in contemporary music.” (Brandes is a member.)
Tilney’s concert will be the first to incorporate earlier music — 17th-century works by Johann Jacob Froberger and Louis Couperin, played on a small but rich-toned single-manual harpsichord based on an Italian model of the period.
But Tilney is also an aficionado and performer of modern music who has commissioned many harpsichord pieces from contemporary composers over the years, so his June 19 program will also include the premières of two works written for him, one by Brandes, the other by another young Wandelweiser composer, Taylan Susam, who was born in Amsterdam to Turkish parents and now lives in Belgium.
A Place to Listen will continue with a new-music concert on July 17. Details at: aplacetolisten.tumblr.com.
