Past Events

Vox Luminis is a prize winning Belgian early music vocal ensemble created in 2004 by Artistic Director Lionel Meunier. The ensemble performs over 60 concerts a year, appearing on stages in Belgium, across Europe and around the world. Since its inception, the ensemble has been defined by its unique sound, appealing as much through the personality of each timbre as it does through the color and the uniformity of the voices. The repertoire for this concert includes selections by Heinrich Schutz and Thomas Morley leading up to Henry Purcell’s exquisite and poignant Funeral Sentences and Elegy on the Death of Queen Mary.

“A few years ago I composed three Tenebrae Lessons for Good Friday at the request of the nuns of [Longchamps], where they were sung with success” – Francois Couperin

In celebration of Francois Couperin’s 350th anniversary, this program includes his sumptuous trio sonata L’Impériale, and a performance of one of the masterpieces of French baroque music, his surviving three Leçons des Ténèbres, for two sopranos, viola da gamba and basso continuo.

A great opportunity to hear the next generation of early musicians! Members of the Baroque Orchestra Mentorship Programme and recipients of EMV’s Scholarship programme perform chamber music beside their mentors.

Admission is by donation.

Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms have been considered the backbone of the Classical canon since the late nineteenth century. Monica Huggett and Byron Schenkman explore some of those composers’ most beloved works, using instruments and playing styles appropriate to the time when that canon was established, including Early Music Vancouver’s magnificent 1870 Broadwood piano. This is a rare opportunity to hear Monica Huggett’s interpretation of Bach’s monumental Chaconne in D Minor — a work which Brahms studied and transcribed — side by side with Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata, a Bach keyboard toccata, and Brahms’s gorgeous Sonata in G Major, op. 78.

Written in the wake of his opera Billy Budd, Canticle II was composed between late 1951 and early 1952 and is a potent “miniature opera” for alto, tenor and piano created from a 15th-century Chester Miracle Play telling the story of Abraham and Isaac. Written for and dedicated to contralto Kathleen Ferrier (who created the title role in The Rape of Lucretia 1946), her part is now more commonly sung by a counter-tenor. Britten later drew on Canticle II for his War Requiem, in the setting of Wilfred Owen’s bitter retelling of the biblical story