VCO’s winning teen talents featured; Farewell to Classics
Each year, the Victoria Chamber Orchestra sponsors a concerto competition for young string players in honour of violinist Louis Sherman (1907-1999), who spent the last 20 years of his life here and contributed much to our music scene. He helped establish the VCO, which made its debut in 1995, and was passionate about the education of young musicians.
This year’s competition, in February, produced two winners: violinist Emma Reader-Lee, 17, and violist Danielle Tsao, 16. Both study with Michael van der Sloot in the Victoria Conservatory of Music’s advanced Collegium program, and both participated, last summer, in the Young Artists Program at the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa. (Reader-Lee, who is in Grade 12, plans to study music in university.)
The two winners, who already have some experience as soloists with orchestra, will perform with the VCO in a pair of concerts this weekend (tomorrow, 8 p.m., First Metropolitan United Church; Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Oak Bay High School; $20/$15, music students free; victoriachamberorchestra.org).
Given their instruments, it goes almost without saying that they will perform Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, a double concerto for violin and viola whose richness and originality reflects Mozart’s special love for the latter instrument.
Surrounding the concerto on the program are Wagner’s tender, radiant Siegfried Idyll (the Wagner of choice for people who hate Wagner), and Britten’s Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, a substantial string-orchestra piece from 1937. wrote this movement as a gentle hint to his aristocratic patron, who had extended his usual stay at his summer palace and whose orchestra members longed to return home. As is often done, the Victoria Symphony will dramatize the finale, with the players leaving the stage as their parts end.
Also on the program are violin concertos by Haydn and Mozart (the latter’s great “Turkish” concerto, No. 5), and a symphony by C.P.E. Bach.
Violinist Karl Stobbe will be both leader and featured soloist. Born and raised in Prince George, Stobbe is currently associate concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra but also has an impressive solo career, in a diverse repertoire. (His 2014 album of solo sonatas by Ysay_e was nominated for a Juno Award.) He is also trained in violin repair and construction, and is a scholar of his instrument’s history. The Aventa Ensemble is “dedicated to Canadian and international new music,” though even by their standards the repertoire in their next concert, on Sunday, is ostentatiously contemporary 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, UVic, $20; aventa.ca).
Of the four pieces on the program, none was composed before 2014, and three will receive their premières: Insularité III: plenitudes et envies, by Patrick Giguère, a québécois composer currently doing a Ph.D. at Birmingham Conservatory, in the UK; As mountain winds, by David Eagle, who is based at the University of Calgary; and (D) Tourner, by Philippe Leroux, a French-born composer based at McGill University, in Montreal.
(The latter two pieces were commissioned by Aventa, while Giguère’s was written for an ensemble that folded before it could be performed.)
Aventa has now premièred more than 120 works since it was founded, in 2003.
Leroux’s piece, a concerto for percussion and ensemble, will feature the Taiwanese-born virtuoso percussionist Aiyun Huang. A colleague of Leroux’s at McGill’s music school and a researcher at the university’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, Huang has an international performing career and has herself commissioned and championed more than 100 new works.
Also on Sunday’s program is Zazpiak Z, a quintet by Bertrand Dubedout, part of a cycle of seven works that alludes to the seven provinces of the Basque Country, where Dubedout was born. The work draws on rhythms associated with the txalaparta, a Basque percussion instrument.