R. Murray Schafer

Schafer's is a strong and benevolent, highly original imagination and intellect - a dynamic power whose manifold persorial expressions and aspirations are in total accord with the urgent rreeds and dreams of humanity today."
-Yehudi Menuhin

Born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1933 Raymond Murray Schafer has won national and international acclaim not only for his achievement as a composer but also as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur. Through his unique explorations of the relationships between music, performer, audience and setting, he has expanded the potential and appreciation of music and its place in the arts and culture of our time.

Many of his compositions and writings stand as landmarks in the evolution of music and its communication in the twentieth century. Schafer's diversity of interests is reflected by the enormous range and depth of such works as Loving (1965), Lustro (1972), Music for Wilderness Lake (1979), flute concerto (1984) and the World Soundscape Project, which united the social, scientific and artistic aspects of sound and introduced the concept of acoustic ecology. Major books include E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music (1975), The Tuning of the World (1977), On Canadian Music (1984), The Thinking Ear: On Music Education (1986) and Voices of Tyranny: Temples of Silence (1993).

Karol Szymanowski

Karol Szymanowski (October 6, I882 - March 29,1937) was Poland's most important composer during the period separating the death of Chopin and the coming to maturity of post Second World War composers such as Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Panufnik and Gorecki. Szymanowski was a composer of real individuality, an artist of aristocratic sophistication and a cosmopolitan who nevertheless responded strongly to the artistic aspirations of his native land.

Szymanowski was born in Tymoszowka in the Ukraine, part of the former kingdom of Poland. His parents were cultivated, ardently nationalistic Poles who encouraged the artistic inclinations of their five children, three of whom became musicians. Szymanowski's father and an aunt gave him his first music lessons. Later he was taught by another relative, Gustav Neuhaus, (whose son Heinrich became the teacher of Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter).

In Berlin in 1905, Szymanowski and a few colleagues founded the 'Young Composers' Publishing Co., which promoted concerts and the publication of new Polish music and was supported by pianists Artur Rubinstein, Harry Neuhaus and violinist Pavel Kochanski. From 1909 to 1914 Szymanowski travelled: to London, Italy, 'Vienna, Algiers, Constantine, Biskra and Tunis. In the summer of 1914 he returned to Tymoszowka and remained there throughout the war years. In relative seclusion he was able to concentrate on writing and studying. This period witnessed his greatest creativity, a time of amazing diversity, with both "Metopes" and "Masques" dating from this period of his life.

After the First World War, and the upheaval that saw Poland re-emerge as an independent state, the Szymanowski family moved to Warsaw, where the young composer devoted himself to re-invigorating Polish music and to supporting his now impoverished family. By 1930, and now Rector of The Warsaw Academy, he had achieved relative prosperity and considerable success for his compositions, which included much music for violin, the popular ballet Harnasie, two operas and various vocal works including Stabat Mater and Veni Creator.

Sadly, by 1932, due to advancing tuberculosis, he became too weak to continue his work. His longtime friends supported him throughout his illness, subsidizing his stay in a Lausanne Sanatorium. He died there in 1937.

Despite the advocacy of his works by prominent Polish instrumentalists, Szymanowski's music, since his death, has remained outside the mainstream of concert society programming. At the time of this writing, however, his music is attracting new and wide-spread interest, just as the music of Mahler (and more recently, Janacek) found an audience years after its composer's death, it now seems Szymanowski's tum to emerge from the 'reserve' to the permanent collection.

Notes by Janina Fialkowska

Prokofiev

After nearly 15 years of living in the West, Prokofiev returned to his native Russia in 1933. Although he had achieved a certain degree of success in his travels, both as composer and pianist, Prokofiev never felt at home outside Russia.

"Foreign air does not suit my inspiration because I'm Russian, and that is to say the least suited of men to be an exile, to remain in a psychological climate that isn't of my race... I've got to go back. I've got to live myself back into the atmosphere of my native soil. I've got to see a real winter again, and a spring that bursts into being from one moment to the next. I've got to hear the Russian language echoing in my ears. I've got to talk to people who are my own flesh and blood so that they can give me back something I lack here: their songs - my songs."

Prokofiev went back cautiously, leaving his family in France to follow when he had settled. After a tour of Spain, Portugal and North Africa in late 1935 and early 1936, he finally settled in Moscow with his family, making his final trip to the west (England and the USA) a year later.

Prokofiev had imagined a new Russia with a mass audience for his music, but he found the opposite, along with a brutal, repressive Soviet regime. His return in 1936 coincided with the government's condemnation of Shostakovitch's opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk. This was the beginning of the end of freedom of expression for Soviet composers. Eventually Prokofiev fell victim to the government's criticisms and labels of "formalism". Until his death in 1953, Prokofiev's creative life was plagued with battles and the pressure of compromise.

Perhaps because solo piano music did not require the collaboration of the state apparatus, (as with ballet, opera or symphony productions) it was to his piano sonatas that Prokofiev turned to continue his experiments with tonality and form in total freedom. He began work on the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas (the so-called "war" sonatas) simultaneously in 1939. The Sixth was completed in February, 1940, and performed by the composer at a private gathering, with the young pianist Sviatoslav Richter turning pages. Richter, who would give the first public performance of this piece in November, 1940, was overwhelmed by his first impression. He later remarked: "I had never heard anything like it. With a singular stroke the composer severed himself from the ideals of Romanticism and included in his music the shattering pulse of the 20th century ". The Sixth Sonata remains one of the greatest, and most daring works in the piano literature.

Prokofiev's large orchestral works of this time, including Romeo and Juliet, necessarily took on a greater accessibility, or "new simplicity" as the composer referred to it. During his brief visit to the United States in 1937, a prominent New York critic reviewing the orchestral suites of Romeo and Juliet went so far as to say that "Prokofiev has written music for the masses and at the same time has attained extraordinary nobility." Prokofiev arranged Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet after he had prepared the orchestral suites from the ballet in the previous year (1936). One could say that they are actually a transcription of the suites since only one section (Dance of the Girls) differs from the two suites combined. The ten selections-contain the highlights from the ballet.

In the last twenty years of his life, the only piano works of consequence that Prokofiev produced were the final four sonatas (6-9) and the transcriptions of the Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet scores. The ballet transcriptions are works of translucence and soaring lyricism, and the sonatas are cornerstones of twentieth century music.

Notes by Andrew Burashko

Milton Barnes

After graduating from the Conducting School of the Vienna Academy of Music, Barnes led the St. Catharines and Niagara Falls (USA) Symphony Orchestras and Choruses, the Toronto Repertory Orchestra which broadcast and recorded extensively for CBC Radio/Television and the Toronto Dance Theatre (as composer/conductor), in addition to guest conducting. His compositions continue to receive praise internationally from musicians, audiences and critics. Nominated for a Juno award, Erica Goodman's recording of his "Divertimento for Harp and Strings" is one of the most frequently broadcast Canadian works.

Srul Irving Glick

Born in 1936 this Torontonian was a producer of classical music at the C.B.C. from 1962-1986, during which time he earned seven Grand Prix du Disque and a Juno award. Having since become a prominent Canadian and international composer he has received a Governor General's medal and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. His music, a unique integration of contemporary classical music and Hebraic lyricism, has won him considerable acclaim.

Harry Freedman

Born in 1922 in Poland, Harry Freedman came to Canada with his family as a young child. He, like Milton Barnes, showed an early interest in jazz, but quickly became a classical musician, and as an oboist-English hornist was a member of the Toronto Symphony from 1946-1970. Since establishing a successful career as a full-time composer he has emerged as one of Canada's most frequently performed, with close to 180 compositions in diverse styles and idioms. Mr. Freedman is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Andrew P. MacDonald

Born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1958, Andrew P. MacDonald earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at the University of Michigan, where he studied with William Bolcom. For the past decade his compositions have been winning prestigious prizes in Canada and abroad. His "Violin Concerto" (recorded on the BIS label) won the 1995 Juno Award for "Best classical composition," and his works have been performed in England, France, Norway, Germany, and the United States. Dr. MacDonald is also active as a concert guitarist, and is professor of composition and theory at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec.