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It hardly seems possible, but one of Vancouver’s newer classical endeavours, the Blueridge Chamber Music Festival, is now in its fifteenth season of using innovative, quality music to enliven late summer.
This year a quartet of concerts clearly defined the festival’s mission: a program of works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an almost forgotten star of the late Victorian era; a program of very demanding music by the dean of contemporary German composers, Helmut Lachenmann; and a program of new works by local composers Jordan Nobles, Jennifer Butler, and Mary Jane Coomber.
Particularly noteworthy was the Aug. 13 concert, held downtown in The Annex, dubbed “Three Queens,” which focused on music of Violet Archer, Jean Coulthard, and Barbara Pentland, important Canadian women who died within a few weeks of each other in 2000.
Blueridge commemorated the 25th anniversary of their passing with an unusually well-curated event, combining performances of Coulthard’s three piano trios with Archer’s final string quartet and Pentland’s 1983 Piano Quintet. Although these exemplary works were written within a fifteen-year period by composers in late maturity, three very different and still underrated musical personalities were revealed.
Coulthard’s Lyric Trio launched the program, an elegant, often touching piece of great appeal. Two members of the Microcosmos String Quartet, violinist Andrea Siradze and cellist Zolton Roszy joined Coulthard specialist pianist Jocelyn Lai in a performance that was as fresh as it was charming. Lai gets the balance between lush lyricism, sparkling keyboard figurations, and formal rigour just right. To conclude the first half of the program, the same performers tackled Coulthard’s one-movement Legend of the Snows, an evocative proposition created for a trio of young Canadian musicians, Desmond Hoebig, Gwen Hoebig, and Jon Kimura Parker, who all went on to have sterling careers.
Coulthard expert Jocelyn Lia.
The second half began with another Coulthard trio, The Birds of Lansdowne, played by violinist Marc Destrubé, cellist Zoltan Rozsnyai, and pianist Jane Hayes. This is something of a sport in the extensive Coulthard catalogue, a work suggested by the avian paintings of J. Fenwick Lansdowne that weaves recorded birdsong through the musical textures. While ultimately a minor Coulthard, it demonstrates the concern for the environmental issues, which became an ongoing thread in her later compositions and certainly appeals to green-conscious listeners.
Archer’s Third String Quartet, heard in the first half of the concert, is an intense and ambitious proposition. Archer’s early works often demonstrate her lineage as a student of Hindemith; her third quartet takes up where Bartók’s celebrated series of quartets leaves off. The work has a certain austerity, pandering to neither players nor audience, but what a finely thought out work, and what a strong, committed performance by the Microcosmos.
The program ended with one of Barbara Pentland’s last works, her Piano Quartet, yet another work of outstanding quality. Pentland was one of the few women to participate in and learn from the famous Darmnstadt summer music sessions, and for about a quarter century her music reflected the then-potent influence of Anton Webern. By the 1980s as the serial ice age was melting into postmodernism, Pentland found a more relaxed, richer idiom, rife with exceptional textures. The quartet still counts as “difficult” by many standards, but despite a certain loquaciousness it’s always impressive, and was performed with integrity and high style by the Microcosmos with the third pianist of the evening, Manuel Laufer, an evening that defines the value and rewards of a festival setting.
Concert three of this year’s Blueridge festival is Lachenmann at 90, tonight, Aug. 14. The festival winds up Friday, Aug. 15, with Happy Blueridge Birthday. Both programs run at 7 p.m. at The Annex.
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