April in Victoria: Orpheus, Emily Carr's rainforest and a youth orchestra at forty

April is a month of anniversaries in Victoria.

The Emily Carr String Quartet closes its twentieth season with Letters from the Rainforest at Christ Church Cathedral, giving voice to Carr's landscapes through Shostakovich and Piazzolla — a programme that only makes sense on this coast. The Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra marks forty years with a gala at the Farquhar, built around Brahms' Second Symphony.

Pacific Opera Victoria stages Orpheus & Eurydice at the Royal, which is the oldest story about what music can do: a musician talks his way into the underworld and nearly gets away with it.

The month's most unusual evening is EMSI's Artemisia — Light and Shadow at the Leonardo Da Vinci Centre: a staged account of the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi's life, with dinner. And for a first concert, Platypus Theatre's Bach to the Future is aimed at children but written with enough wit to survive adult company.

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