Kevinbazzana@shaw.ca
IN CONCERT
What: Victoria Symphony
(Legacy Series)
When: Monday, Dec. 7, 8 p.m. Pre-concert talk at 7:15.
Where: Royal Theatre (805 Broughton St.).
Tickets: $17 to $68.50. Call 250-385-6515 or 250-386-6121
James Ehnes's appearance next Monday, in Beethoven's Violin Concerto, has featured prominently in the Victoria Symphony's publicity this season. No wonder: Ehnes is one of the best, most admired and successful violinists currently before the public. And though he now lives in Florida, he's Canadian-born -- in Brandon, Man., in 1976.
Ehnes maintains a busy international concert schedule and has recorded more than 20 CDs, including a Grammy-winning 2006 CBC Records disc of concertos by Barber, Korngold and Walton (he has also won six Juno Awards.) His most recent CD, of Paganini's 24 solo Caprices, on the Onyx label, was summed up by a Toronto Star reviewer in one word: "Wow."
You can read more about Ehnes's career on his website, jamesehnes.com. Suffice it to say that you shouldn't miss an opportunity to hear him (and his 1715 Stradivarius) in concert -- if you can still get a ticket.
Monday's concert will open with Sibelius's elegiac Rakastava (The Lover, 1911-12), a three-movement suite for strings and percussion adapted from an early choral setting of Finnish folk poems, and will include a noteworthy première: local composer Tobin Stokes's Symphony No. 2.
Born in 1966, Stokes has been a full-time composer for more than 15 years, a prolific creator of concert works (instrumental and vocal) as well as music for opera, ballet, theatre, film, television and public events. He has composed more than a dozen works with orchestra, several during his tenure (2005-08) as one of the Victoria Symphony's composers-in-residence -- most recently, the impressionistic En Plein Air, performed in March.
Stokes's new symphony is "emphatically dedicated" to Hugh Davidson, who commissioned it, and whom Stokes calls a "mentor and inspiration." Davidson, himself a composer, has had a distinguished career in the arts in Canada and England since the mid-1950s, and now lives in Victoria. Lately, he has been privately commissioning new compositions. (His first, John Estacio's Triptych, was performed by the Victoria Symphony in March.)
Stokes's first symphony was commissioned by the Powell River Academy of Music and was premièred in that city (where Stokes grew up) in the summer of 2005. Titled Coast Salish Symphony, it was based on traditional native songs. The Symphony No. 2 has no such folkloric or programmatic implications; it is an "abstract" work, and draws knowingly on a venerable tradition. Set in four movements and running a little over 20 minutes, it has the profile and proportions of a Classical symphony, right down to the Italian tempo markings for each movement: Allegro con brio, Adagietto, Presto giocoso, Andante con moto.
Various classical forms can be detected, too. The first movement is in sonata form; the whimsical, dance-like third movement is in the three-part form of a minuet-and-trio; the finale is a rondo. As for the sombre slow movement, its unusual metre (5/4) and tempo marking (Adagietto) recall famous precedents, respectively Tchaikovsky's Sixth and Mahler's Fifth -- though not intentionally, Stokes says.
The music is tonal -- "more or less in B minor" -- but exploits what Stokes describes as the "unresolved sound" of "fresh and unfamiliar" harmonies built up from intervals of a fourth, and indeed there is frequently a sense of unease, of striving, in the music.
The developmental impulse is strong here; Stokes subjects his thematic and rhythmic motifs to plentiful variation, segmentation and juxtaposition, creating forms that are busy but also tight and convincingly argued.
This, in short, is a real symphony, and counts as a milestone even for a composer as conspicuously successful as Stokes. The Victoria Symphony should be commended for using James Ehnes's selling power to ensure that the new work receives a high-profile première.
Stokes, meanwhile, is hardly idle. He will contribute music to various Olympic-related events, and is composing a big choral-and-ensemble work, Missa Brevis Pro Serveto, to a specially written Latin text, for the Unitarian Church; it will be performed at the University of Victoria in May.
Note: James Ehnes will give a master class, open to the public, in the Victoria Conservatory of Music's Alix Goolden Hall, on Monday from 3 to 5 p.m. ($10; free for VCM students).
