Scorned but successful
Oskar Morawetz may be Canada's most successful composer with the world's public, but not with his own colleagues.
In the past year, he's been played close to 40 times outside the country from Australia to New
York's Carnegie Hall and Belgium. His "Piano Concerto No.1," which will be played at Massey Hall tonight and tomorrow night and then recorded for Capitol Records by the Toronto Symphony and pianist Anton Kuerti, has already been done by the Montreal, Minneapolis and CBC Symphony orchestras, the Orchestra of America, and played on BBC radio. Three more performances of it are slated for next season.
Winner of the Montreal Symphony orchestra's $1000 piano concerto competition, the piece is barely two years old. Even big name composers rarely score with a new work that quickly.
Even so, many of Morawetz's fellow Canadian composers view him with scorn. He's old-fashioned,
they say, adding that that's why he is so successful.
[...]
Not that it worries him.
"Benjamin Britten, whom I admire greatly, is also considered old-fashioned by most of the English composers today," he said. "Brahms and Bach got the same treatment."
"What does it matter. When we listen to Brahms, Bach, or Richard Strauss, do we bother whether they wrote in the style that was
the fashion of their times?"
Morawetz is one of the few contemporary composers who feels not only that his work should be understood, but that it should be grasped readily. "I can't agree with these people who say you have to listen to a work 10 to 15 times to understand it.
"If I don't like a piece of food, I don't eat it 10 more times to persuade myself that I do," he said.
[...]
