Sunday, January 21, 2024
2:00 pm | Sid Williams Theatre

These musical gems by Vivaldi, Bach and Mozart are some of the most marvellous, energizing, and popular pieces in orchestral repertoire. Marianna Martines will become one of your favourites too! She was a pupil of Haydn and a friend of Mozart, and the discovery of her Sinfonia in C major will enrich what you already love about the classical era of music.

CONDUCTOR: Cosette Justo Valdés

GUEST ARTISTS: Calvin Dyck VIOLIN
Sevilya Hendrickx, VIOLA

PROGRAMME

VIVALDI   L’estro armonico (The Harmonic Inspiration), Op. 3 No. 3

J.S. BACH   Suite No. 3 in D major, BWW 1068

M. MARTINES:  Sinfonia in C Major

MOZART   Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in Eb major, K. 364

Cosette Justo Valdés, VIS Artistic Director

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Calvin Dyck
Vancouver Island Symphony Concertmaster

Calvin Dyck has been concertmaster for the Vancouver Island Symphony in Nanaimo since 2000, and is also the director for the Abbotsford Youth Orchestra.  Calvin has played concerts in over 15 countries, and is in demand as a producer, teacher, conductor and adjudicator.  Although a college aptitude test recommended a career as a tug boat captain, Calvin finished a DMA in Violin Performance as USC with minors in choral conducting, and music history. He currently has about 25 students.  Some of his former students are currently studying at universities across Canada, and several have played with the Vancouver Island Symphony. Calvin was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for service to the community.  He has also been awarded an honorary Doctor of Humanities by Trinity Western University.  In these unusual times he is grateful to have some musical opportunities along with part-time employment as a farmer and a delivery driver.

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi  (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) was an Italian Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, impresario, and Roman Catholic priest.

Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, Vivaldi is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers. His influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers and was paramount in the development of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s instrumental music and the French concerto (Michel Corrette, Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, Louis-Nicholas Clérambault).

Vivaldi composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than fifty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons. Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children. Vivaldi had worked as a Catholic priest for 18 months and was employed from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi’s arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.

After almost two centuries of decline, Vivaldi’s musical reputation underwent a revival in the early 20th century, with much scholarly research devoted to his work. Many of Vivaldi’s compositions, once thought lost, have been rediscovered – in one case as recently as 2006. His music remains widely popular in the present day and is regularly played all over the world.

 

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Johann Sebastian Bach, (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations as well as for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After becoming an orphan at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph Bach, after which he continued his musical development in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar—where he expanded his repertoire for the organ—and Köthen—where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St. Thomas) in Leipzig. He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened in some of his earlier positions, he had a difficult relation with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by King Augustus III of Poland in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.

 

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era.

Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death have been much mythologized.

He composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence is profound on subsequent Western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote: “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years”.

 

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