What: Before the Close of the Day.
When/where: Friday, Sept. 6, 9 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral.
Tickets: Admission by donation.
What: Music at Wentworth Villa: Irwin Shung, piano.
When/where: Sunday, Sept. 8 2:30 p.m., Wentworth Villa (1156 Fort St.).
Tickets: $40, students $25. Online at eventbrite.ca.
It’s not a typo — Friday night, Christ Church Cathedral really will launch its 2019-20 concert season with a fundraising event that begins at nine in the evening.
It is being called a “candlelight concert,” and the goal is for the time, the setting and the repertoire to combine to create an especially atmospheric and meditative listening experience.
The program will be sung by the 13 members of the St. Christopher Singers, one of Christ Church’s resident choirs, led by organist and choirmaster Mark McDonald, a native of Burlington, Ont. who became the cathedral’s assistant director of music in June.
The concert will run only about an hour, but it will be a gorgeous hour, comprising 13 pieces of a cappella sacred music by 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century composers of various nationalities (English, French, Franco-Flemish, Netherlandish, Swiss-German, Italian, Spanish). Among them are some of the biggest names of the era: Josquin des Prez, Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Orlande de Lassus, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando Gibbons.
Appropriately, much of the repertoire has its origins in Compline, the last of the eight units of the Divine Office, a daily series of worship services traditionally performed in both churches and monastic orders of the Roman Catholic Church.
The offices are associated with times of the day, beginning with Matins (after midnight) and concluding with Vespers (at twilight) and then Compline (before retiring).
Compline apparently had its origins in prayers said at bedtime, and some form of this service may date back as far as the fourth century.
Most of the texts of Friday’s program are in Latin. Many of them are familiar — Alma Redemptoris mater, Ave Maria, Ave Regina gloriosa, Magnificat, Nunc dimittis, Requiem aeternam — and the themes they address, including evening light and remembrance of the dead, are appropriate to Compline.
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The fourth season of music at Wentworth Villa will begin on Sunday with a recital by pianist Irwin Shung, in an all-Bach program culminating in nothing less than the monumental Goldberg Variations.
Wentworth Villa, a beautiful Carpenter Gothic mansion on Fort Street, built in 1863, is one of the oldest houses in Victoria. In 2012, it was purchased by a couple who spent several years undertaking an exquisite, costly restoration, and it subsequently opened as a museum devoted to the city’s architectural heritage.
It is also a venue for music, with an intimate recital room that seats at most about 100 people and so is ideal for repertoire like Bach, whose keyboard music, in particular, is not well served by big spaces.
Shung, 34, who grew up in the Seattle area, made his local debut in January, in Sidney, with an all-Bach recital that resulted in the invitation to perform at Wentworth Villa.
Shung holds a bachelor’s degree in music from the prestigious Peabody Institute, part of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music (where he subsequently taught). He recently joined the faculty at Notre Dame College, a liberal-arts college near Cleveland, though he is also artistic director of an annual concert series in Bellevue, Washington.
Bach has become something of a specialty for Shung, who also studied the harpsichord, and his Bach playing can be sampled generously on YouTube, to which he has posted a complete and very impressive set of videos taking in the whole of Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
On Sunday, in addition to the Goldberg Variations, Shung will perform the French Suite No. 6 in E Major, one of Bach’s more modestly scaled suites of French-style dances, but also one of his loveliest and cheeriest and most brightly coloured.
Incidentally, concerts at Wentworth Villa tend to sell out, and at last report Shung’s was tending in that direction; however, waiting lists are taken, and seats sometimes free up at the last minute. Also, season’s passes (seven concerts for the price of six: $240/$150) will be sold until Sunday (wentworthvilla.com).
Note: On Saturday (7:30 p.m., First Metropolitan United Church), the women’s choir Ensemble Laude will launch its 2019-20 season by repeating last season’s final program, Gathering, originally given in June (ensemblelaude.org).
