What: Victoria Baroque Players: Grand Orchestral Suites
When/where: Friday, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine (1611 Quadra St.).
Tickets: $30, seniors $25, students and children $5. Call 250-486-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the McPherson Box Office, Munro鈥檚 Books and Ivy鈥檚 Bookshop.
What: Music at Wentworth Villa: Vetta String Quartet
When/where: Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Wentworth Villa (1156 Fort St.).
Tickets: $40, students $25. Online at .
The Victoria Baroque Players, whose ninth season will begin on Friday, has collaborated with some top-ranked guest artists over the years, including violinist Jeanne Lamon, who was music director of the renowned Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, in Toronto, from 1981 to 2014.
Lamon has played with and directed the VBP twice, in 2013 and 2018, both times in special Christmas programs for the Early Music Society of the Islands. On Friday, however, she will make her first appearance in the VBP鈥檚 regular season, and we could see more such appearances in the future, given that she moved to Victoria this summer.
Friday鈥檚 program pays tribute to the Concert Spirituel, in Paris, which ran from 1725 to 1790 and counts as the first important and long-lived concert series in the modern sense of the term.
(These were called 鈥渟piritual concerts鈥� because they were founded to provide entertainment during the Lenten season and Holy Week and on other religious holidays, when opera houses were closed.)
Concert Spirituel programs initially focused on sacred vocal works, but also featured instrumental music, including curtain-raising overtures, symphonies and concertos. (The inaugural concert, on March 18, 1725, opened with Corelli鈥檚 popular Christmas Concerto.) This series established a pattern for 18th-century concerts, whose programs freely mixed vocal and instrumental repertoire.
Friday鈥檚 program comprises instrumental music only, dating between 1703 and 1765, by composers (French and otherwise) who were popular in Paris and had direct connections with the Concert Spirituel. As many as 17 performers will participate, in music mostly featuring horns and woodwinds, in addition to strings.
The repertoire includes a piece by Michel-Richard de Lalande, from a set of 鈥渟ymphonies for the king鈥檚 dinner;鈥� a聽chaconne by Jean-Marie Leclair; a 鈥渟onate en symphonie鈥� by Jean-Joseph Cassan茅a de Mondonville; a concerto grosso by Francesco Geminiani; and a grand seven-movement suite that Telemann wrote in 1765, at age 84, two years before his death.
The concert will close with Haydn鈥檚 early Symphony No. 30, also from 1765, a short three-movement work nicknamed Alleluia because its first movement quotes a Gregorian chant.
Music by Beethoven will be especially thick on the ground next year, and justifiably so, as 2020 will mark the 250th聽anniversary of his birth. Here in Victoria, the special programming for 2020 will include complete cycles of Beethoven鈥檚 symphonies, string quartets and violin sonatas.
Some performers are starting the celebration early, in the first half of the 2019-20 season, including the Vetta String Quartet, a house ensemble of the 91原创-based series Vetta Chamber Music, whose 34th season will begin this weekend. On Sunday, in between concerts in 91原创 and on Salt Spring Island, the quartet will appear at Wentworth Villa, the restored heritage house and architectural museum on Fort Street, now in its fourth season as a concert venue.
The quartet comprises Vetta鈥檚 artistic director, violinist Joan Blackman, and three colleagues: violinist Maria Larionoff (from Seattle), violist David Harding (from Pittsburgh) and cellist Eugene Osadchy, a co-founder of Vetta now based in Texas.
Sunday鈥檚 program will open with Beethoven鈥檚 C-minor quartet, the fourth of聽six quartets he published as Op. 18 in 1801. Vetta is promoting this as 鈥渢he first quartet Beethoven ever wrote,鈥� though there is actually no evidence that this is true. As far as we know, the piece dates from 1799, but some scholars have always suspected, on internal evidence, that it was based on earlier material perhaps dating back to Beethoven鈥檚 youth in Bonn. (Translation: They don鈥檛 think the piece is very good.)
The program also includes Shostakovich鈥檚 short, uncomplicated, very entertaining String Quartet No. 1, from 1938, and Tchaikovsky鈥檚 great String Quartet No. 3 in E-flat Minor, from 1876, written in memory of a friend, the Moscow-based Czech violinist Ferdinand Laub, who had died the year before 鈥� hence the work鈥檚 funereal slow movement, which mimics the Orthodox memorial service. (Laub鈥檚 ensemble had given the premi猫res of Tchaikovsky鈥檚 first two quartets.)
Concerts at Wentworth Villa, whose music room seats at most about 100, tend to sell out, though waiting lists are taken and can be accessed online (). Usually, at least a few last-minute ticket-buyers can be accommodated.
