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University Centre Auditorium
September 28, 2025
I must begin this with a confession: the "main event" in Sunday's Victoria Symphony programme, the work around which, as Christian Kluxen told us, the entire programme had been built, was not my reason for attending (we'll come to that later).
Regular readers of this site (and I'd like to thank both of you for sticking with us) will be aware that vocal music is far from my favourite genre and so a new song cycle is not exactly calculated to entice me. The fact that the composer of said cycle, Jake Heggie, is a highly successful opera composer did not help — I believe that Verdi, Wagner and Puccini also had some success with opera, but I've never been keen on their music either.
There can, however, be no doubt that the enterprise was a more than worthy one: singer Joshua Hopkins approached Heggie to compose the work in honour of the memory of his sister, Nathalie Warmerdam who, along with Carol Culleton and Anastasia Kuzyk, was murdered in a single day in September 2015 by the same man, a former partner.
Set to specially-written texts by Margaret Atwood — sparse yet tremendously effective — Songs for Murdered Sisters consists of eight fairly brief songs covering a gamut of emotions.
So, I had expected to admire the work; what I had not expected was how deeply affecting and moving it would be, to the extent that I had to completely rethink my planned structure for this review.
The music overall, is essentially tonal and displays a fine sense for orchestral effects, but effects entirely at the service of the music and the texts, rather than for their own sake. I was especially impressed by Heggie's use of the percussion, whether the crotales, stroked cymbals and glockenspiel of Enchantment, or the ominous rubbing with the beater of the tam-tam and bass drum that framed Rage.
This was a truly remarkable work, even leaving context aside (surely an impossible, not to say pointless task) and remarkably performed. I can only mention a few — "highlights" seems entirely the wrong word — perhaps notable moments would be more appropriate.
The almost pastoral oboe and flute, later taken up by the English horn, of Dream, could never quite disguise the underlying acute sense of loss. Bird Soul opened with a conjuring of birdsong, yet sounded not in the least like Messiaen — no mean achievement. The music gently supported the musing text ("If birds are human souls / What bird are you?") before suddenly turning very dark at "Singing Dead Too Soon".
Lost had the feel of a funeral march, gradually building to a huge, outraged climax at the words "Rage and hatred / Jealousy and fear".
The final Coda: Song — "If you were a song / What song would you be?" — offered no optimism, but perhaps acceptance.
Hopkins sang magnificently throughout; this is obviously deeply meaningful music for him, but he also has the instrument and sensitivity to do it justice. He was superbly supported by Christian Kluxen and the Victoria Symphony.
At the close I believe I detected more than a few moist eyes in the orchestra itself and I am sure I was not the only one in the auditorium wishing that I had been able to check my Y-chromosome at the door.
A truly memorable, not to say devastating experience.
(And this is how I originally intended to open this review...)
"There is much in my make-up that is weak... when I am standing in front of a grand orchestra and have drunk half a bottle of champagne, then I conduct like a young god. Otherwise, I am nervous and tremble, feel unsure of myself, and everything is lost."
So wrote Jean Sibelius to his brother Christian in 1903.
Sibelius had a life-long problem with alcohol. In 1908 he was diagnosed with a tumour in his throat and underwent thirteen operations before it was successfully removed, at which time his doctors told him that he must refrain from drinking (and smoking, for Sibelius also loved cigars) for the rest of his life.
He managed to do without both for some seven years, a period described by his wife Aino as the happiest of their marriage.
But by 1917 he was drinking (and smoking) again and a decade later we find the following desolate entry in his diary: "Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair... In order to survive, I have to have alcohol... Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock-bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out".
1927 was the year after Sibelius' last major work, the tone poem Tapiola, after which he composed almost nothing — or at least almost nothing that he was prepared to present to the public: it is widely rumoured that he had completed an eighth symphony, but destroyed it in 1940 when he burnt several manuscripts in a laundry basket, an act he described as an auto-da-fé. He had told his friends that "If I cannot write a better symphony than my Seventh, then it shall be my last".
Sunday's concert opened with that final, seventh, symphony and closed with its immediate predecessor, possibly receiving its Victoria premiere. Since I began reviewing here, over three decades ago, I have witnessed all of his other numbered symphonies, mostly (except for the fourth) at least twice, but neither I nor anybody I spoke to could recall a previous performance of the sixth.
Kluxen's reading of the seventh was very fine; tempos throughout were unimpeachable, dynamics were — for the most part — well observed and the performance displayed a fine sense of the long line.
The Victoria Symphony played, as seems to be their habit these days, superbly, producing a fine, full sound with excellent blending of strings and wind.
There were, I will admit, a handful of occasions when the performance did not quite gel for me; in particular the trombone's threefold interjections at significant points in the structure (marked Aino in the manuscript); while the first was clearly audible, the other two were somewhat buried in the tout ensemble — not, I suspect, the fault of principal trombonist Graham Middleton.
Perhaps most disappointing was the final, dramatic cadence ending on what is perhaps music's most enigmatically ambiguous C major. Sir Simon Rattle, we are told, views it as "almost like a scream", whereas Kluxen finds "a sense of clarity, of revelation". Serge Koussevitsky, whose 1933 live performance in London was the first ever issued on record and who was no stranger to the notion of "improving" Sibelius' orchestration (as witness his emended timpani parts in final coda of the second symphony) perhaps saw the conclusion as triumphant and reinforced the violins' grinding B to C with a solo trumpet.
I will forever, though, be looking for that sense of inscrutability, as embodied in the first performance I ever attended, a 1966 Promenade concert under the direction of that great Sibelian and underrated conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent.
My reaction to that final, impenetrably strange cadence was "What?" Or perhaps, to quote a 1980s pop song [Footnote] "like the feeling at the end of a page, when you realise you don't know what you just read".
However, my minor carping should not detract from the overall experience which was, as my notebook tells me, "not perfect, but pretty damned good".
The second half of the programme was one hundred percent Sibelius.
We began, in almost complete darkness, with The Swan of Tuonela, the second and most frequently performed of Sibelius' Four Legends from the Kalevala , Op.22, composed in the mid-1890s (it was originally the third movement, but was promoted to second place in the composer's final revision of the music, in 1939).
The music portrays a "mystical" swan swimming around the Isle of Tuonela, the realm of the dead in Finnish myth.
It is also one of the most notable works in the literature for the English horn and was taken very slowly, with soloist Russell Bajer standing behind the orchestra in the choir seats.
Bajer has been a member of the Victoria Symphony for almost as long as I have been reviewing them. He is a consummate musician and I have yet to be disappointed by anything I have heard him play (the late Gary Karr was also an admirer, as he told me himself). We — and the orchestra — are lucky to have him.
This was exquisitely played and one of those performances that you simply don't want to end.
But end, of course, it did, although Kluxen led seamlessly into the final work on the programme, as the lights gradually brightened (making the work of the reviewer, trying to take notes) somewhat easier.
Oddly, the last time I head the orchestra "segue" from on work to another was a decade ago, when Tania Miller went straight from the fourth to the seventh symphony of, yes, Sibelius.
I thought that was a serious mistake, but this time the juxtaposition worked very well.
According to that great critic (and my personal inspiration) Sir Neville Cardus "Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails he offered the public pure cold water".
In no work does this seem more apposite than the Symphony No.6 in D minor, Op.104, although one must also acknowledge Benjamin Britten's "I think he must have been drunk when he wrote that" (a pretty safe bet during Sibelius' later years).
I had literally been waiting decades for this performance and am happy to report that it did not disappoint.
The opening movement, perhaps because of its positioning within the programme, revealed hitherto unexpected thematic connections with The Swan of Tuonela. The luminous strings of the opening were simply gorgeous and later there was some wonderful interplay between first and second violins and the violas.
The second movement opened with excellent flute and bassoons and was very colourful overall. The third, almost perky and full of momentum.
The finale opened briskly and built to a whirlwind tempo, before — somewhat strangely — slowing down dramatically before speeding up again. I'm still not quite sure why.
But the ending of the entire work was exceedingly lovely and quite magical.
As I intimated above, well worth the wait.
A truly memorable afternoon's music making.
An afterthought: with the final link in the Sibelian symphonic chain completed at long last, it occurs to me that in the last few decades Victoria has witnessed the majority of great Nordic orchestral masterworks.
There is still a handful remaining, though, and I for one would personally love to hear Sibelius' Tapiola, his last major work and a symphony in all but name; Nielsen's Third (Espansiva) and Sixth symphonies: yes, Aventa gave a splendid account of Hans Abrahamsen's chamber arrangement of the latter, but still...; Wilhelm Stenhammar's wonderful Second Symphony and his orchestra masterpiece, the Serenade in F; and while we're here, how about a repeat performance of Berwald's Sinfonie Singulière, last heard under the baton of Kees Bakels some quarter of a century ago?
Footnote If you are interested: "Words" by Missing Persons
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