The fourth annual Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival ended last Sunday with the strains of Brahms during a finale by the Lafayette String Quartet. The four women from Victoria, who have played together for 23 years and are active on the international concert circuit, performed with the festival's artistic director Alexander Tselyakov on piano. Even Tselyakov, who is renowned as a soloist with major orchestras and teaches at Brandon University, acknowledged that the concert series comes together so well because of the full support from the community. A nine-member committee and a host of volunteers and sponsors provide assistance, flowers, tents, cars and a place to stay for visiting musicians.
"Certainly it's a community event," said festival chair Lise Aylmer who is delighted with the success of last weekend's effort. "The musicians arrive a week before to rehearse and they fill the Harbour with music."
Aylmer said she was particularly happy that Friday's opening free concert, Chamber Music Does Not Bite, which is contributed by the musicians themselves as a chance to play and explain more about the music, was a huge success. The audience numbered 110 including 15 children, and it will be broadcast on Coast Cable 11 starting this week.
Another conversational addition to this year's festival, the Intermezzo, with CBC's Jurgen Gothe interviewing members of the Quartet, also went smoothly.
One of the most moving moments came on Saturday evening when the musicians dedicated the sombre work of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Trio Elegiaque in D minor, Op.9, to the memory of a former festival volunteer, the late Ann Barker. After the last low, grave note, the Madeira Park Performance Centre was wrapped in silence. "No one wanted to break out of that spell," said Aylmer, until Tselyakov thanked the audience and subsequently drew applause.
Sunday's final concert also featured the violin grace of Joan Blackman, formerly of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and currently the artistic director of a chamber music series. As she played, Blackman swayed like a willow in the wind, her sheer physicality enhancing her performance on a Beethoven serenade with Yariv Aloni on viola and Christie Reside on flute. She told the audience that most people consider music to be either song or dance, but she proceeded to show the full house how music can also be a conversation between two instruments by playing a duet with cellist Tanya Prochazka.
The festival committee is already looking forward to their fifth anniversary Aug. 21 to 23, 2009, with the date set later in the month so as not to conflict with the Festival of the Written Arts in Sechelt as it did this year, thus dividing the audience.
A piece of music will be especially commissioned for the occasion from the renowned Canadian composer and University of British Columbia professor Stephen Chatman. The musical work, a trio of piano, viola and cello, will be called the Pender Harbour Suite. How sweet is that?
