On the offhand chance that you happen to see these notes in advance of today’s performance, we would like to suggest that you take a few minutes out of your busy life, head down to Cadboro Bay or the Dallas Road bluffs or even the Ogden Point breakwater, and sit with the ocean for a while. And if that’s not possible, this concert will be the next best thing.

Immersive, expansive, calming, stormy, even glittering: these are all adjectives often applied to the sea, and ones that are just as pertinent to the music we’ll hear in what, at first, might appear to be an unusually wide-ranging program. Follow the threads of influence and circumstance, however, and it will become clear that Victoria Symphony music director Christian Kluxen has assembled a deft and coherent voyage through the deepest of emotions.

Let’s begin in the middle, with the world premiere of a Victoria Symphony commission from local composer Anna Höstman. Saltwater states its inspiration plainly, and it’s worth noting that Höstman was born in Port Hardy, at the far northern tip of Vancouver Island, and spent some of her youth in even-more-remote Bella Coola. The ocean is in her blood, and that’s more than just a convenient figure of speech.

Without the sea we would not be, she contends, a fact that was brought home to her while beginning work on Saltwater during the COVID lockdown. “An interesting thing I learned was that as salt enters water, it breaks apart into ions,” she points out. “Ions carry

electrical charge in the ocean, as well as in our physical bodies. Saltwater then is what allows the little electric impulses to travel to our hearts and brains that tell us to live and breathe. As I was composing this piece, it was as though I was in communication with this object coming into

being that was every day reminding me to keep breathing. So the piece also symbolizes a lived experience for me that was, at the time, very reassuring.”

Of course, as is obvious from Höstman’s earlier Victoria Symphony commission, Snow Variations, the natural world has always shaped her work. “For me, composing is very much about expressing a feeling or confluence of feelings,” she says. “These, in turn, are suggestive of colour, vibration, texture, [and] density. Saltwater is a meditation on being back home on the West Coast with family and community. The piece is shaped by a deep love for these coastal landscapes which are resilient, yet fragile; powerful, yet also subtle. While walking through these forests, and near the sea, I am often aware of echoes intermingled with my own presence here, as though this point in time is only one

of an infinite number. This is so magical and mysterious to me and very specific to this coast.

“I also wanted to explore a very warm harmonic language in my new piece, a sense of being home,” she continues. “Saltwater explores, among other things, the accumulation of resonances through passages of shifting colour.”

In that regard, the Massachusetts-born, California-based John Adams is kin to Höstman. His music, too, is nuanced and layered, albeit with perhaps a more geological than oceanic sense of time. That said, however, his groundbreaking Shaker Loops—from which “Shaking and Trembling” is excerpted—originated in his contemplation of ripples in moving water.

 It’s more difficult to tie Richard Strauss to any specific marine environment, given that he was born and died in landlocked Bavaria. And yet his Oboe Concerto is part of a late-career renaissance that found the German composer contemplating even darker and deeper mysteries than the sea: the meaning of life, and how to exit this world with graceful resolve. From 1944 to his death in 1949, the octogenarian Strauss wrote some of his most enduring music, including the magnificent Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs. While those are primarily concerned with mortality, remorse, and reflection, the Oboe Concerto is something quite different, being sprightly enough that it is a considerable challenge for the soloist, as the Victoria Symphony’s principal oboe, Michelle Feng, explains.

“It’s like running a marathon,” Feng says. “The soloist plays a lot. A lot!  It’s not exactly what the oboe is built to do. And then of course any time you’re doing a musical piece where it’s a stamina thing, it’s ‘How do you make it NOT sound difficult?’ It’s got to sound easy, because that’s what the piece needs. And it’s so beautiful. The harmonic language is quite easy to listen to, I would say, compared to some of the more bombastic Strauss, and a lot of what else was going on when it was written. So how do you preserve that feeling, when you feel like you’re going to keel over?”

Feng notes that the San Francisco Philharmonic’s [Symphony’s] principal oboist, Bill Bennett, actually did keel over during a performance of the Oboe Concerto in 2013, and died a few days later.

“I don’t intend for that to happen yet,” she adds, which will be a relief for her many admirers.

Making the task easier is that the Oboe Concerto’s prolixity is always in the service of joy. The work finds Strauss looking back on a long and productive life—and on the musical pleasures that sustained him through the grim years of the Third Reich, including Ludwig Van Beethoven, whose Symphony No. 5 in C minor Strauss quotes in the Oboe Concerto’s third movement. There are also passages that nod to the fourth composer on this program, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom Strauss considered “the most sublime of all”.

In a move that is as fascinating as it is unorthodox, Kluxen intends to insert the excerpt from Adams’s Shaker Loops into Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C major, which ends the night. “This symphony is one of the few that doesn’t have a minuet, and there’s a bit of mystery as to why,” the conductor observes. “That little gap got me thinking—and it felt like the perfect space to insert something unexpected. It also nods to an older tradition of eclectic programming, which I think we’ve lost touch with. In this case, it adds a raw, kinetic energy that sharpens the classical framing without disrupting it… Or maybe it does? Let’s see. Either way, Mozart can handle it.”

Notes by Alex Varty

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756—1791)
Idomeneo Overture, K. 366

Richard Strauss (1864—1949)
Oboe Concerto in D major, TrV 292
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante
III. Vivace

INTERMISSION

Anna Höstman (b. 1972- )
Saltwater (premiere)
Commissioned with the support of the Hugh Davidson Fund at the Victoria Foundation

Mozart
Symphony No. 34 in C major, K.338
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante di molto
III. Allegro vivace

John Adams (b. 1947- )
Shaker Loops
I. Shaking and Trembling