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Immigrant experience inspires new music

IN CONCERT Victoria Symphony (Legacy Series): Min Plays Grieg, conducted by Tania Miller, with Lorraine Min, piano When/where: Monday, 8 p.m., Royal Theatre (805 Broughton St.) Tickets: $35 to $80. Call 250-385-6515 or 250-386-6121; online at rmts.

IN CONCERT

Victoria Symphony (Legacy Series): Min Plays Grieg, conducted by Tania Miller, with Lorraine Min, piano

When/where: Monday, 8 p.m., Royal Theatre (805 Broughton St.)

Tickets: $35 to $80. Call 250-385-6515 or 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the Victoria Symphony Box Office (Suite 610, 620 View St.) and the Royal and McPherson Box Offices

DieMahler String Quartet: Latin Freedom, Latin Delights, with Alexander Dunn, guitar

When/where: Saturday, 7 p.m., Church of St. Mary the Virgin (1701 Elgin Rd.)

Tickets: Adults $25, seniors and students $22.50. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the Royal and McPherson Box Offices, Ivy's Book Shop, and the Cadboro Bay Book Co.

The Victoria Symphony launches its 2012-13 season Monday evening with a program that includes a perennial favourite, Grieg's Piano Concerto (featuring local pianist Lorraine Min), alongside a more bracing, less-familiar masterpiece: Danish composer Carl Nielsen's dramatic Fifth Symphony, from 1922.

The program will open with the first of four premières the symphony will offer this season: a short piece by Michael Oesterle, just beginning his second season as the orchestra's composer-in-residence.

Charged with writing about an hour's worth of new music to be performed over two seasons, Oesterle decided to create a single unified work in four "chapters" that are self-contained but collectively form a kind of symphony.

Titled New World, the cycle is Oesterle's homage to the immigrant experience, and represents four stages in the immigration process: passage, expectation, adaptation and integration.

It's a subject of personal significance for Oesterle, who was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1968 and moved to Canada in 1982. The music draws heavily on his memories of being a young immigrant. (The allusion to Dvorák's New World Symphony is intentional: Oesterle explores, in updated form, some of the same issues that motivated Dvorák.)

In the first chapter, Crossings - to be performed Monday - Oesterle conveys the immigrant's journey from the perspective of a child uprooted from an idyllic, pastoral home and arriving in a new, distinctly urban world that is unnerving but provokes a sense of wonder. As the child falls asleep on the first night in his adopted country, the piece ends.

Oesterle stresses that New World is an emotional landscape exploring the range of an immigrant's feelings - hope, fear, wonder, regret, anticipation, nostalgia. Tackling a subject so "humbling in its breadth" has inspired him to push the envelope in his music, he says.

Oesterle, who has composed almost 100 works and has a considerable record of success in Canada and beyond, has lived in the Montreal area since 1996, though he had already cultivated a close relationship with the Victoria Symphony and its music director, Tania Miller, before becoming composer-in-residence: Three of his works have been performed here over the past decade, including violin and trumpet concertos.

He is full of praise for the orchestra's skill, range and adventurousness, and his music for New World showcases some of its members - including, in Crossings, newly appointed principal cellist Brian Yoon, who, appropriately, was born in South Korea.

Last season, Oesterle made six trips to Victoria, and he will be here at least as often this season (he will be present at Monday's concert), though his work for the symphony, which includes planning new-music events and advising on repertoire, continues even when he is back home.

The second chapter of New World, Of Hope and Refuge will be performed in the orchestra's season ending concerts May 11 and 12; the remaining chapters, The Golden Door and Home, will follow in the 2013-14 season. The latter, a finale in which Oesterle promises a surprise, will bring his symphony to a close on a "massively nostalgic" note. North America is for him still a place of magic and wonder, he says. "I never really get over it - I never get tired of it."

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Earlier this year, the DieMahler String Quartet, founded in 2010 by violinist Pablo Diemecke, offered five monthly Saturday-afternoon concerts at an Oak Bay church, with programs mostly favouring lighter repertoire.

This fall, the ensemble will give four more monthly concerts in the same venue, mostly on Saturday evenings and featuring more substantial programs, organized thematically.

The first, this Saturday, is Latin-oriented, offering 20th-century music by Mexican, Spanish and Italian composers - Bernal Jiménez, Turina, Ponce, Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Two of the works are scored for strings with guitar and will feature expert local guitarist Alexander Dunn.

The DieMahler series will continue with concerts on Oct. 20 (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) and Nov. 17 (Haydn, Mozart, Schubert) as well as a Christmas concert on Dec. 8 that will include a choir and guest soloists.

Kevinbazzana@shaw.ca