[...]
The concert closed with five big, ambitious songs composed in 1947 and 1950
by Oskar Morawetz, a Czechoslovak émigré based in Canada since World War II. The
texts are strong poems of Archibald Lampman, Anne Wilkinson, Housman and Blake,
and Mr. Morawetz has not let the music cower in awe before them; the idiom is
late-Romantic, but the usage is not sentimental. The highly independent piano
parts seemed to function as commentary on the scenes or states portrayed
by the poems and took on considerable power in the composer's performance of
them.
