The Victoria Symphony’s 2025/26 season opener begins with a bang and ends with the unlikeliest of love letters. Meanwhile, sandwiched between these two extremes, we’ll find what some musicians describe as an exercise in sheer terror. But don’t worry: listeners are in good hands with the VS and its music director, Christian Kluxen. They’re also in for a wild—and wildly enjoyable—ride.
Starting the new season with John Estacio’s Frenergy is a masterstroke. It highlights the Victoria Symphony’s commitment to performing music by living Canadian composers; it offers a vehicle for the orchestra to shake off any rust accumulated over the summer; and it is as joyous and assertive as its title. Frenergy, Estacio says, is a neologism that combines “frenetic” and “energy”, which is entirely appropriate for this five-minute juggernaut of a scherzo. Premiered in 1988 by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, it’s a work that Estacio describes as as “brisk, infectious, and quirky”. It fully lives up to that billing.
The second half of the program is given over to what, in theory, might seem the most unlikely team effort to ever grace the orchestral stage. In the beginning, circa 1856, we have Johannes Brahms writing one of his most memorable chamber-music efforts, the Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor. It is largely an exercise in the masterful exposition of five principal themes, intended to showcase the pianistic skills of Brahms’ close friend Clara Schumann, who was at the keyboard when the work was premiered in 1861. Seventy-six years later, the pioneering serialist and doyen of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg, took that same piano quartet and, counterintuitively, gave it a loving and respectful orchestral arrangement that barely hints at the modernism he helped invent.
It’s strange but true. With his orchestration of the Piano Quartet No. 1 Schoenberg stayed so faithful to his predecessor’s ethos that their collaboration is often referred to as the Fifth Symphony that Brahms never wrote. (Of course, how many potential masterpieces the famously self-critical composer had started, then discarded, will never be known.)
The true nature of Schoenberg’s affection for Brahms has occasionally come under dispute, although it is not as mysterious as the web of admiration, influence, and love that existed between Brahms and the two Schumanns, Clara and Robert. One contentious opinion is that Schoenberg, in his role as provocateur, was being markedly ironic in his 1947 essay “Brahms the Progressive”, but the plainspoken warmth and eloquence of the piece we’ll hear today contradicts that. It seems more apparent that Schoenberg was claiming Brahms as an ancestor—a view that is far more tenable in hindsight than it might once have seemed. As the eminent Canadian critic and broadcaster Robert Harris has asserted, “Schoenberg rightly noted that it was those late works of Brahms, those little piano pieces, that were in fact the models for Schoenberg’s incredibly ground-breaking piano works. If you look at Opus 23 of Schoenberg, or Opus 19—these little tiny piano pieces where the twelve-tone language was basically invented—they’re like Brahms’ Opus 119….I mean, that was the model that Schoenberg used, and he admitted it.”
There is no controversy whatsoever about Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major. As the Victoria Symphony’s guest soloist Kerson Leong says, it is “one of the most revered works in the classical repertoire”. But, he adds, “it also has a reputation for striking fear into violinists’ hearts just because of its supposed difficulty.”
Difficulty poses no barrier for Leong, who won the 2010 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists at the age of 13. But the wily Beethoven laid a cunning trap for any cocky soloist in his only mature violin concerto, and it has nothing to do with the sheer volume of notes on the page or the stamina required to hold on through its 40-plus minutes.
“I guess the difficulty in this context is how to make something out of something quite simple, in a way,” Leong explains. “If we look at the violin part, it’s quite unusual in the sense that, on first glance, it’s just quite a lot of scales and arpeggios: very literally, the basic building blocks of music. Apart from that, as well, it is a very tuneful concerto; it’s very melodic and has beautiful, hummable themes. But they are first introduced by the orchestra, and throughout the piece as well there’s a sense that the violin is there to complement the themes in the orchestra. So in a sense it’s sort of an equal partnership or an equal collaboration between violin and orchestra.
“It’s not necessarily a violin concerto that shows the violin really up-front, or where the orchestra plays second fiddle throughout,” he continues. “In this piece, the violin accompanies the orchestra just as much as the other way around, and that’s part of the difficulty, I guess. It really sort of teaches you to see yourself as part of a bigger picture. It’s a real exercise in empathy—in musical empathy, in listening, in communication, in being able to respond to other musicians and to ideas and to play off of each other. And also, given the relative simplicity of the material, it’s an exercise in restraint as well.”
So is the Violin Concerto mere child’s play for the Ottawa-born Leong? Not at all.
“This concerto is one that I will never get tired of playing,” says the 28-year-old virtuoso, “because it’s always such as cleansing, transcendental, cathartic experience. And it’s a welcome challenge!”
Notes by Alex Varty
Christian Kluxen, conductor