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Classical Music: Teachers’ turn to play with performance of Schubert

For three years, mezzo-soprano Kathryn Whitney has directed an intensive art-song program, unique in Canada, aimed at older, amateur singers and pianists.

For three years, mezzo-soprano Kathryn Whitney has directed an intensive art-song program, unique in Canada, aimed at older, amateur singers and pianists.

All three programs to date focused on a single great early-Romantic song cycle in German — this year, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller-Girl), from 1823, a 20-song “monodrama” that tells a tragic story of unrequited love. An apprentice miller, journeying by a brook, arrives at a mill and is smitten by a girl, but the appearance of a rival, a hunter, provokes jealous rage, despair, and finally suicide.

The Schöne Müllerin Project ran at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, where Whitney, who grew up here, first trained and where she and her collaborator, pianist Anna Cal, are instructors. (Whitney, who holds a doctorate from Oxford, also co-directs the SongArt Performance Research Group at the University of London, in England.)

Fourteen singers and 10 pianists, all over 30, participated in the Schöne Müllerin Project. They included university professors, teachers, doctors, nurses, a chemist, a lawyer, a farmer, a physiotherapist, a midwife, a beautician, the director of a nursing home and a nuclear-disarmament specialist who is a consultant to the United Nations.

The program, which began April 2, comprised lectures, workshops, group masterclasses and individual and duo coaching. Last weekend, the students performed Die schöne Müllerin in two concerts in the VCM’s Wood Hall, the sort of intimate setting in which songs were usually heard in Schubert’s day.

On Friday, Whitney and Cal will offer their own performance of the cycle, also in Wood Hall (7 p.m., by donation; schoenemuellerinproject.ca).

 

More local ensembles are bringing their seasons to an end, including the chamber choir Vox Humana, which, on Friday, will offer a characteristically diverse program (7:30 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $20, 25 and under free; voxhumanachoir.ca).

The program begins in the late Renaissance, with the perennially strange Gesualdo, and includes some 19th-century music (Dvorák, Rheinberger), but focuses primarily on contemporary composers, including one of Vox’s own members, Georin Costello.

Two premières constitute the biggest news here — first, the British Columbia première of American composer David Lang’s the national anthems (2014). This 25-minute, multi-movement work, with string-quartet accompaniment, is a “meta-anthem” whose text Lang created by drawing sentences from the anthems of all 193 UN member states.

The concert will close with the première of Vox’s latest commission: Bush Chord, by local composer Tobin Stokes, based on a poem by Canadian artist and writer Margaret Lindsay Holton.

 

On Saturday, the period-instrument duo comprising violinist Paul Luchkow and keyboard player Michael Jarvis will collaborate with bassoonist Katrina Russell at Christ Church Cathedral’s cozy Chapel of the New Jerusalem, which comfortably seats only about 150 (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., $25/$20; 778-231-5126).

Russell, an Edmonton native who studied at the University of Victoria, spent almost 20 years based in London, working with some of the biggest early-music groups in Europe, but relocated to Vancouver Island in 2010.

Saturday’s concert will showcase the dulcian, a predecessor of the bassoon with a distinctive, lovely sound. The program mostly comprises sonatas and ground-bass variations by an interesting range of 17th-century Italian and Austro-German composers.

 

The grandest musical events this weekend will be the Victoria Philharmonic Choir’s performances of Monteverdi’s glorious Vespers, from 1610.

This 13-movement, 90-minute work is a pinnacle of early-Baroque music and the most ambitious sacred choral work written before Bach’s time. It is complex and technically treacherous, ostentatiously diverse, and makes unconventional, very particular demands in terms of performance practice and instrumentation.

The VPC gave a memorable local première of the Vespers in 2013, before a large, very enthusiastic audience. With the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth providing an excuse, it decided to offer the Vespers again — two performances this time, in the same venue (Saturday and Sunday, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, 8 p.m., $35/$20, under 13 free; vpchoir.ca).

The 80-voice choir will be joined by seven accomplished vocal soloists and a 16-piece orchestra comprising strings, cornetts (an exquisite early woodwind-brass hybrid), sackbuts (an early trombone), lutes and organ. As in 2013, Montreal-based ensemble La Rose des Vents will play the cornett and sackbut parts.