One measure of the impact an art group has in its community is in the reception and honours accorded its director. “It’s all in the timing,” said Robert Aitken, the artistic director and resident conductor of New Music Concerts (NMC) Sunday night. Aitken accepted his 2009 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts with easy grace and humour.
The public acceptance of this award signaled an acknowledgment not only of the very significant contribution by Aitken to the cause of new music in Canada, but also of an official appreciation by the Canada Council of the seemingly marginalized high-art culture that NMC represents.
Aitken’s award was just a preamble to the evening, however. The central occasion was the inaugural concert of the four NMC events called Polish Perspectives, curated and headlined by the distinguished Polish pianist and composer Zygmunt Krauze.
Krauze’s compositions on display included his early Polychrome (1968). The unlikely ensemble of clarinet, trombone, cello and piano was surprisingly effective in sustaining what the composer refers to as “the continuation of one sound structure without changes or contrasts.” Despite its achowlegded debt to the unitary theory of the Polish painter Wladyslaw Strzeminsky, this work also remarkably captures the Zeitgeist of the minimalist music scene of the time developed by its US pioneers LaMonte Young and Terry Riley.
That Polychrome’s premiere took place at the Royal College of Art in London in 1968 is further proof that Iron Curtain-era Polish composers were not all working in a Soviet cultural backwater. On the contrary, some of them were evidently plugged into the mainstream of the European avant guard. The vigour of the well-crafted compositions of the youngest generation of Polish composers such as Wojciech Blazejczytk, Agata Zubel, and Pawel Mykietyn, all exhibiting work last night, attests to that international pedigree. In contrast to Polychrome, Krauze’s other work performed by NMC, his masterful and mature Piano Quintet (1993), sounded resolutely tonal in language.
Andrew Timar
