Last weekend saw the opening of the Chamber Music Festival with performances of music as old as the seventeenth century and as recent as this one.

Les Violons Du Roy played the earliest baroque and classical pieces.

The New Orford String Quartet offered the supple, joyful interweavings of the classical Haydn, followed by a nuanced account of Mendelssohn’s romantic grief. Artistic Director and cellist Paul Marleyne joined the Quartet for later Russian composer Glazunov’s quintet. This piece has a bit of everything. Long romantic melodies, some thick harmonies, and lots of tricks, like a whole movement based around different combinations of pizzicato and arco (plucking and bowing), or themes that insist on high harmonics from both violin and cello. All of which these musicians made appear easy. A really great concert.

On opening night, the Gryphon Trio brought us from the late-eighteenth century with Beethoven’s optimistic and playful first published piece to the Slavic grandeur of Dvorák’s late-nineteenth-century Trio in F minor.

But in between we heard a very special piece from the twenty-first century. “Candle Ice” is written for piano trio accompanied by a looped recording of ice fragments jostling in the water during the spring thaw in Great Slave Lake. The composer, Carmen Braden, who hails from Yellowknife, has big ears for the musicality of the natural environment. In this context, the clinking of ice fragments during the spring thaw sounded a lot like an orchestrated percussion section (not unlike something from Shostakovich), to which the trio played simple repeated lines, or sometimes expressive frenetic outbursts, blending with the sounds, ultimately fading into a reflective silence.

The PEC Chamber Festival is lucky to have Carmen Braden present this week as its Composer in Residence. On Friday afternoon she will offer a performance of her songs in folk and jazz styles. This is an appropriate warm-up for the headliner concert that evening by dynamic jazz singer Caity Gyorgy.

At noon on Saturday, Ms. Braden will offer a “sound walk” in the neighbourhood of St. Mary Magdalene, something which promises to reveal the music that surrounds us. Anyone who listened to “Candle Ice” will be curious to hear through these ears.

On Saturday evening Ms. Braden will offer a pre-concert talk in anticipation of the performance of her most recent piece, “Imaginal,” by world-renowned violinist James Ehnes.

Mr. Ehnes explained how this commission came about. “Carmen Braden is a great friend. We met a decade ago during my 40th birthday tour. It was such a funny thing: we were scheduled to go up to Yellowknife and she got in touch out of the blue. If you know Carmen this is very on-brand for her. She just got in touch and said ‘hey, you know, I’m a composer in Yellowknife and I was thinking maybe I could write you a piece and you could play it.’ And we said, ‘yeah, OK, that sounds fun!’

“I think I had heard her name in Canadian music circles but I didn’t know her at all. But I got a kick out of just the simplicity of that. That’s a beautiful idea—you’re coming to my town, how about we create something together. So, I went up there and we just really hit it off. We enjoyed the piece very much, it’s called ‘Magnetic North.’

“We hit it off musically and personally and had had a great time. She and her family are really ensconced in Yellowknife and they were great tour guides: they helped us really understand a little bit of that community. And so we kept in touch over the years.

“So, for this year’s 50th birthday tour it just seemed to me like a natural choice to approach Carmen and she was excited to do it. She wrote this piece for me and my accompanist, Andrew Armstrong, which we really love. We’ve now done it at eight or nine of the tour concerts so far.

“It’s a really special piece of music that I think is a great example of her unique voice. She occupies a unique space between what we think of as the ‘classical music’ firmament and the singer-songwriter world.

“It may be too strong to say this piece deals with the ‘midlife crisis’ idea,” says Mr. Ehnes, “but it asks about getting to a certain stage or age in your life and what might be possible.”

“It has very poetic title, ‘Imaginal,’ and it is,” he insists. At the same time, the piece offers a description of a scientific phenomenon. As Mr. Ehnes describes it, “‘imaginal’ cells are in essence like stem cells in a caterpillar. A caterpillar at a certain stage of its life makes itself a cocoon and sort of dissolves into goo and comes out as a butterfly.” The musical setting expands on the metaphor.

“As we’ve been friends for a decade, our lives have changed and as she was writing this piece she was examining her life as a new mother and what her compositional voice was, and, of course, Andy and I are sort of at that period of life where you think about who you are and who you might be. It’s a beautiful piece with a beautiful idea and we’ve really enjoyed playing it.”

The Festival closes on Sunday with the return of last year’s “Four Play Cello” event, featuring four star cellists, including Paul Marleyne, playing material ranging from Bach to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and including two works by Carmen Braden.

For tickets and more information, visit pecmusicfestival.com.