A festival for the gentle composer
When the Toronto Symphony gives the first public performance of Oscar
Morawetz' Sinfonietta for Strings next week, it will launch what almost amounts
to a Morawetz festival - close to a dozen performances of his works in six
different cities by five different orchestras, within a single month. It's
doubtful if another Canadian composer has ever had that happen.
Morawetz is a gentle, mild man, much given to smiling and certainly not a
hard-driving career composer (like most composers, he makes 10 times as much by
teaching). So why the spate of performances?
Perhaps it's because today a Canadian composer can get his works published
and recorded; there's nothing like a recording to spread the word and interest
[to] other musicians. But perhaps it is also because Morawetz' works are, by
ultra-modern standards, conservative and listenable rather than harsh and novel.
"In all times of the history of music," he explains, "there were composers
who tried to bring some complete new sounds, or harmonies, or rhythms; and
others who tried to adapt to their own personalities the music of the past 10 to
20 years.
"Many of them were really, in their time, considered old-fashioned - for
instance Bach, who was stylistically behind his sons; or Brahms, who was
harmonically behind Liszt and Wagner. Through Ravel's whole life he was
considered nothing else but an imitator of Debussy.
"Benjamin Britten certainly doesn't try to bring into his music the latest
trends of Stockhausen of [sic] Cage - and for me Britten is the greatest
composer born in this century."
The gentle Morawetz, with his soft Czech-accented voice, is a diplomat. By
saying it just that way he avoided having to compare Britten with Igor
Stravinsky, who was born in 1882.
"I personally," he continued, "resent terribly the attitude of many
historians and writers about music nowadays, who find striking only a work which
introduces some new percussion instrument or some more complicated rhythm, or
some sound that hasn't been heard before, and who belittle everything else.
"I have always considered myself a composer who tried to express the music of
today with my own personal feelings. I'm more interested in the quality and
expression of music than I am in novelty. Many composers think music is like the
car business; every year there has to be a new model."
Among the benefits of his kind of composition is that a work is not played
just once or twice, but is apt to get repeated hearings, as his Divertimento for
Strings and Second String Quartet have had. The latter has just had the
performance of its life (Morawetz' opinion) from the Orford string quartet, and
the former will get two more performances, in Quebec City, in this month's
Morawetz festival.
Other works on the schedule include two performances of his piano concerto,
in St. Louis, by Toronto pianist Anton Kuerti, led by ex-Toronto conductor
Walter Susskind; a performance of his Passacaglia on a Bach Chorale, in Memory
of John Kennedy, under Guy Fraser Harrison in Oklahoma City; two Edmonton
performances of Reflection After Tragedy, which had its premiere last summer in
Toronto; and the world premiere of his Two Preludes for Violin and Piano, on the
Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Later in the season there'll be three more premieres. The Festival Singers
will introduce Crucifixion, in memory of Martin Luther King; and two cello-piano
teams are awaiting a not-yet-completed work.
Until Tuesday, the third premiere, in December, was the one that pleased
Morawetz the most. It was to be his birthday-present piano suite - but it now
has a tragic tale to tell.
Last year a well-to-do Montreal industrialist commissioned the composition of
a brief piano piece as a gift for his wife's 39th birthday. This sort of
commission is all too rare today and Morawetz was so pleased that instead of a
four-minute piece he wrote a whole piano suite three times as long.
Anton Kuerti had already premiered two Morawetz works - he is becoming
Morawetz' most active exponent - so the composer hesitated to ask him to do a
third one. But Kuerti found the score on his own at the Canadian Music Centre,
and is preparing to play it, first in Montreal, then in Toronto, and later on a
tour of Germany.
The husband who commissioned the work, and his delighted wife who is a former
music student, were planning to hold hands at the Montreal premiere of "their"
composition. But he was Donald McParland, president of the British Newfoundland
Corp., which is building the huge Churchill Falls power project. And last
Tuesday night he was killed in a plane crash.
[ed: The piece commissioned by McParland referred to above is Morawetz' Suite
for Piano]
