Oskar Morawetz
June Graham talks to the composer about premières of his latest musical works
The world premières of two works commissioned from Oskar Morawetz of Toronto, one of our most prolific composers, whose music probably is played farther and wider than that of any other Canadian, were recorded last month at the CBC Summer Music Festival in Toronto for broadcast on CBC radio. Contrasting Moods, settings of two poems by Archibald Lampman, will be heard this week in the series Choirs in Concert on CBC Thursday Music, July 17th, at 8.03 p.m. (On FM Friday, July 27th, at 9.03 p.m.) It is performed by the Festival Singers of Toronto (directed by Elmer Iseler), who commissioned it for Centennial Year. It was not performed earlier due to the Singers' many other engagements. It's the first work Morawetz has done for this famous choir.
"I wanted to use Canadian poetry, but it was so difficult to choose," Morawetz tells us. "I'd set some poems by Lampman before, and after four days in a library going through Canadian anthologies I chose two more of his poems, because they had a certain atmosphere that appealed to me, and because it wasn't necessary to understand every word to grasp their mood. I wanted to avoid the usual subjects of nature, love and death. I succeeded with The Railway Sta!ion, but found that all but two or three of Lampman's works are about nature, so I capitulated and chose April in the Hills. The Railway Station is concerned with the nerve-wracking excitement of a railway station. 'The flare of lights, the rush, and cry and strain, / The engine's scream, the hiss and thunder smite'. It describes the faces of people waiting for the train: 'What sweet or passionate dreams and
dark distresses, / What unknown thoughts, what
various agonies'. April in the Hills is imbued with the happy feeling of nature awakening in the
spring, when 'I feel the sun upon my hands; / And far from care and strife / The
broad earth bids me forth."
The broadcast also includes On the Beach at Night by Bergsma; The Living Flame of Love by Norma Beecroft; and Three Blessings by John Beckwith. Production: James Kent.
The other première, Reflections After a Tragedy, to be broadcast later, was commissioned by the CBC, and performed by the CBC Festival Orchestra conducted by Lawrence Leonard, director of the Edmonton Symphony. "It was an excellent performance," Morawetz reports. "Leonard was so faithful to my ideas." He conducted without a score, and describes the work as of very high quality, most profound, and very rewarding to interpret. Morawetz says it was written as an afterthought following a tragic event last year. It opens with two strongly dissonant chords in a very tense mood, and after a big dramatic climax, the music dies down to pianissimo like a prayer for peace, played by
two contrasting choirs of winds and muted brass. Leonard plans to conduct it next season, and it's scheduled for a BBC performance.
This month the world première of Morawetz's Two Preludes for Violin and Piano will be presented by the Australian Broadcasting Company, featuring a distinguished Czech now living in Australia, J. Jasek. Morawetz has just received a Canada Council grant to write a new work for Canada's Atlantic Symphony.
As a composer he is entirely self-taught, and he's amused by the fact that he was a complete dud when he began piano study at the age of six in his native village of Svetla Nad Sazavou, about 80 miles from Prague, Czechoslovakia, where his father owned a large estate. Local teachers, embarrassed by and envious of the fact that he had perfect pitch, taught him practically nothing for three years. Neither parent had any musical ability. His father claimed that he couldn't even recognize the national anthem, and had to be nudged to stand up when it was played. The elder Morawetzes predicted that Oskar's older brother, Herbert, now professor of chemistry at Brooklyn Polytechnic, would be the family musician. When the two boys began to study with a new teacher, Oskar went ahead with such speed that he was soon at Herbert's heels, and Herbert announced: "If the shrimp catches up with me in the book, no more piano lessons for
me!" Shortly afterwards, Herbert had to go to Prague to have his glasses changed, and when he returned, a broadly grinning Oskar welcomed him with the news that he had caught up with him in the book. Herbert refused to take any more music lessons, but Oskar forged ahead.
When the family moved to Prague he was accepted as a private pupil by the director of the State Conservatory. He found he could read music very easily, and soon had a knowledge of a great many orchestral scores. George Szell, then conductor of the Prague Opera, took an interest in his progress, and gave him helpful advice in his studies. When Szell
left the opera he recommended Morawetz to its new director as a junior conductor, but Oskar's conducting career came to a halt after the Munich Pact - earlier he had been arrested by the Gestapo in Vienna. He studied music in Paris for a few months, and then came to Canada in 1940 to join his parents who had preceded him here. All the relatives on both sides of the family and many of their friends who could not flee were shot, hanged, tortured to death, or shoved into gas chambers.
When he left Europe, Morawetz still hadn't made up his mind about whether to be a pianist, conductor or composer, but en route to Toronto he visited Szell in New York, who persuaded him to concentrate on composing. Oskar got his doctorate in music from the University of Toronto, joined the staff of the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1946, and later the faculty of the University, where he is still a professor. Later he married an attractive pianist, Ruth Shipman, and they have two children, Claudia, seven, and Richard, three. Oskar says "Claudia can sing any interval you ask her to. I wish some of my university students could do as well !"
From the time of his graduation, his mature, arresting style began attracting attention that soon became international. He has explored the fields of works for full orchestra, string orchestra, piano, voice, violin, and string quartet with great success. He is an extremely painstaking composer - this is so much a part of his daily life that although he enjoys travel he always has a feeling of relief when he's closeted in his studio again, combining musical colors this way and that until another dramatic melodic tapestry is created in the tensely brilliant Morawetz style.
It has won him several prizes. In 1962 his first Concerto For Piano and Orchestra was awarded first prize by Zubin Mehta in a contest sponsored by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Morawetz recalls that he finished writing it at 2.00 a.m. on the deadline date, dashed to the airport with the score, and returned to the house just in time to rush Ruth to the hospital for the birth of Claudia. It was subsequently recorded under the Capitol label with Anton Kuerti as soloist, and has been performed by all the leading Canadian orchestras and programmed several times in the U.S.
Morawetz's Symphonietta for Winds and Percussion won the Critics' Award in the International Composers' Competition in Italy in 1966, competing against 103 other entries from all over the world. The judges were Italy's 12 most important music critics. It was performed at a concert in Italy, conducted by Ernesto Barbini, on tv there and in France and Switzerland, and recorded by the CBC International Service with Jean Deslauriers conducting. Zubin Mehta changed the program of his farewell concert with the Montreal Symphony at the last minute to present the Symphonietta's
première. The U.S. première was at the Aspen Festival in Colorado in 1966, and it has been conducted twice by Seiji Ozawa, and was the first Canadian work conducted by Sixten Ehrling of the Detroit Symphony at the new Meadowbrook Festival. The Aspen performance led to an important commission by the New York Brass Quintet, Concerto For Orchestra and Brass Quintet, which the group has performed five times in the U.S., and it has also been played by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in a CBC broadcast, conducted by Victor Feldbrill. Next season Karel Ancerl and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will present the first public performance of Morawetz's Sinfonietta for Strings, written about the same time as the other one.
Elmer Iseler hopes to have the Festival Singers perform a fairly recent Morawetz work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. The composer says it opens with a melody of a Negro spiritual, Crucifixion,
and the rest of the work uses the words of the spiritual set to Morawetz's own
music.
