The full program of this season’s PEC Chamber Music Festival can be found in this week’s Gazette. It includes music from the 18th through the 21st centuries, in concerts at St. Mary Magdalene and Macaulay Heritage Park — and a yoga session and a workshop to boot.

Artistic Director and cellist Paul Marleyn offers a fine combination of tradition and innovation. Concert-goers will hear music from Mozart to Metallica, from Brahms to the Beatles. Along the way the arts of narration will feature: Tom Allen appears for two musical stories, Martinů’s “The Kitchen Revue,” and Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” inspired by Beethoven, who, in turn, inspired Janáček.

This year’s composer-in-residence represents in himself the great variety on offer this season. A popular and prolific composer, Dinuk Wijeratne is also a conductor and pianist. A Canadian since 2015, he originally hails from Sri Lanka, and was raised in Dubai. These origins are audible in his music, which blends eastern rhythms and melodies into western contexts, like the string quartet, or the classical orchestra, or, indeed, the jazz trio.

Musical genres are not the only domains, as he calls them, he works within. Some of his pieces are settings of poetry to be sung. Others are settings of poems or songs presented without words. The Penderecki String Quartet offers one of Mr. Wijeratne’s “Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems” in the festival’s final concert.

He describes the thinking behind this setting of Robert Bridges’ century-old “I will not let thee go.”

“I’m just an avid reader of poetry and I wanted, for the second one, a love song. I’m interested in love songs about loss. They add more shades. In the context of the pop-like nature of the concept of the piece, I thought it was interesting that if you read that poem and change every ‘thee’ to a contemporary ‘you,’ it almost reads like a pop song, and it just kind of spoke to me. It has a regular, deliberate rhyme scheme — again a very pop-like thing.”

Much of the music his trio performs in September is “very literature-influenced” as well. “Poetry, short stories, it’s all in there,” he notes. These compositions are intended for improvisation. “I grew up in the Middle East, being surrounded by music from all over the world, particularly South Asia, and these are great improvising traditions. They were kind of going in one ear while I was practicing Mozart on the piano. And then when I was a student I had this real desire to learn how to get off the page–because we are sort of connected to notation as a tradition. 

“But then all these cultures, including jazz, have this completely different relationship to notation–they just go. And so I started writing music for different contexts and ten years later I had this sizable catalog of music which I would put in the sort of semi-improvised kind of context.”

The back-and-forth of the musicians in the trio–coordinating, listening, contributing–is not unlike a conversational workshop that aims not at a final creation, but the act of creating. This is characteristic of Mr. Wijeratne, who offers a Creativity Workshop on the Sunday afternoon following his concert.

“Creativity is one of my areas of research. I’m fascinated by creativity across domains.

“During the pandemic I lost all of my concerts, but I still wanted to interact with people, so one of the things I got off the ground was called ‘creativity consulting.’ It was a very rich time for me because I had many conversations with artists sometimes across domains, in theatre for example. This is something I still research: what is creativity? how can we be more creative? It’s now got a whole other connotation in the age of artificial intelligence.”

The PEC Chamber Music Festival will be overflowing with creativity and variety. Performers include seasoned musicians like bassist Joel Quarrington and rising talent like cellist Jacob MacDonald. Ensembles and soloists hail from Ontario and Quebec — and as far as Zurich.

The PEC Chamber Music Festival takes place on the second and third weekends of September, when the Church of St. Mary Magdalene will offer something for everyone. In addition to the well-known composers, there will be a night of popular song traditions, a baroque ensemble, storytelling, and improvising. The Festival generously offers free tickets to those 25 and under, as well as a kick-off concert in the park with the True North Brass on 24 August.  

For more information, visit the Chamber Music Festival.