This Week's Music
The world premiere of Sonata for 'Cello and Piano by Oskar Morawetz of Toronto, below, commissioned by the CBC, will be presented in the Distinguished Artists series on CBC radio Monday night, October 14th, at 10.30 local time, played by 'cellist Laszlo Varga and pianist Pierre Souvairan. This is the third Morawetz work commissioned by the CBC, and his first composition in this form for 'cello.
One of Canada's most successful, most performed composers, he is just finishing a suite of piano pieces commissioned by a Czechoslovakian organization of scientists and artists living outside Czechoslovakia. Next month the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will play his Overture to a Fairytale in its subscription concert series, and later in half-a-dozen
U.S. centres on tour. The piece will also be performed in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in a November concert conducted by Charles Mackerras. And Morawetz's Dirge, dedicated to the memory of Eli Spivak, will be played in Brisbane, Australia, in December.
Last spring Morawetz scored a triumph in Montreal at the world premiere of his prize-winning first Piano Concerto by the Montreal Symphony. Gilles Potvin in the Montreal Star called the concerto "a captivating work, magnificently written for the soloist as well as the orchestra. I have seldom seen a Canadian work received with such spontaneity by the public."
Morawetz figures that the $1,000 prize money, awarded by the Montreal Symphony, works out to about 10c an hour of the time he spent writing the concerto. That doesn't mean he was closeted with his piano for months on end. He's a gregarious man who enjoys social occasions, but when his conscience bothers him he can work on his music mentally while appearing to listen with deep interest to someone rambling on about this and that, "and then," he says, "when he's finished talking about the weather or his health, I can somehow click in again and say something to cover the situation". Only his wife can tell when Morawetz is really back at the piano.
