What: Victoria Symphony (Masterworks): Rachmaninoff and Brahms
When/where: Monday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m., Royal Theatre
Tickets: $35-$88. Call 250-386-6121 or 250-385-6515; online at ; in聽person at the Royal Theatre and the Victoria Symphony box office (610-620 View St.)
What: University of Victoria School of Music, Emerging Artists Alumni Series: Ech茅a Quartet
When/where: Wednesday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (School of Music, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria).
Tickets: Admission by donation
Christian Kluxen鈥檚 first two seasons as the Victoria Symphony鈥檚 music director each began with an ambitious program culminating in a Mahler symphony 鈥� the First and the Fourth, respectively.
The current season, Kluxen鈥檚 third, will close with Mahler (the Third Symphony), though its opening concerts, this weekend, will be more conventional, featuring two monumental late-Romantic masterpieces that are audience favourites: Rachmaninoff鈥檚 almost preposterously difficult Piano Concerto No. 3 and Brahms鈥檚 First Symphony.
Kluxen appears to be surveying Brahms鈥檚 four symphonies systematically, having to date conducted the Fourth (in 2017) and the Third (in 2018), in performances that were technically polished as well as ardent and insightful.
Brahms鈥檚 symphonies are all highly individual and make unique musical demands; it has been interesting and revealing to hear Kluxen grapple with them. Among the particular challenges of No. 1 is that the struggles of its famously fraught, two-decade-long gestation left their mark on the final form of the music.
The Rachmaninoff Third will feature the local debut of Russian pianist Georgy Tchaidze, who lives in Berlin.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1988, Tchaidze has a concert career that takes him around Europe and to China, New York and elsewhere, including Canada. In聽2009, he won the Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, and he subsequently featured in three CD releases on the Honens label. He has performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, in Ottawa and at 91原创 festivals, has toured with the Toronto-based Cecilia String Quartet and has played for the Governor General.
In 2017, Tchaidze was a finalist in the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, in Fort Worth, Texas.
Next Wednesday, the University of Victoria鈥檚 School of Music, in its admirable Emerging Artists Alumni Series, will present the Ech茅a Quartet, one of whose members, violinist Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, is a 91原创ite who got her Bachelor of Music degree at UVic in 2015 and is currently pursuing a master鈥檚 at the Royal Academy of Music, in London.
The Ech茅a Quartet was formed at the Royal Academy in 2017, and is that institution鈥檚 Fellowship String Quartet for 2019-20, while maintaining an international concert schedule.
Since Aug. 20, the quartet has been on a 15-city tour of B.C. and Alberta. UVic is the penultimate stop on this tour, which will end on Sept. 28 on Gabriola Island.
Wednesday鈥檚 program will open with one of Haydn鈥檚 Op. 20 quartets, but will otherwise comprise two works of the modern repertoire both comprising a single long, complex movement: Hungarian composer Gy枚rgy Ligeti鈥檚 String Quartet No. 1, M茅tamorphoses nocturnes (1954), a 鈥渧ariation form without a theme鈥�; and 91原创 composer R. Murray Schafer鈥檚 String Quartet No. 4 (1989).
The Ech茅a Quartet has a special devotion to modern music. It has appeared at new-music festivals, has collaborated directly with composers and has premi猫red many works. At the 2018 International Anton Rubinstein Competition for Chamber Music, it won a special prize for the best interpretation of a work by Ligeti.
Schafer鈥檚 13 innovative specimens form one of the great modern quartet repertoires. He wrote No. 13 in 2015, after he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease, and with characteristic candour titled it Alzheimer鈥檚 Masterpiece.
Other Schafer quartets bear titles, and while No. 4 does not it is no less evocative or dramatic or individual than the others. It incorporates a theme from the prologue to Patria, Schafer鈥檚 mammoth cycle of music-theatre works, and among the influences on the 鈥渓onely mood鈥� of the piece, he said, was the recent death of a friend (poet bp Nichol) and the rural Ontario farm where he had been living alone since 1987.
Schafer was also influenced by E.T.A. Hoffmann鈥檚 story The聽Cremona Violin, 鈥渋n which a mad violinmaker has a daughter with a beautiful voice whom he never allows to sing. When she does so one night, she dies, and at the moment of her death, her father鈥檚 Cremona violin cracks. She had been the sound of the instrument.鈥�
At the end of the String Quartet No. 4, the sounds of a voice and a violin (local musicians will perform these parts) steal in from offstage, as though from the Beyond, to haunting effect.
