[...]
In between the above two repertory staples was the American
premiere of From the Diary of Anne Frank for soprano and orchestra by
Oskar Morawetz. Born in Czechoslovakia, Morawetz wrote this 1969 score in
Toronto where he has lived since World War II. The text is taken from a diary
entry in which Anne imagines having just seen a friend who has been deported to
a concentration camp. The passage in itself is so poignant that music is
rendered almost incapable of adding further dimensions. Yet, somehow, Morawetz's
vivid and marvelously expressive score never seems superfluous, and, with the
exception of an overblown episode near the end, it does not attempt to upstage
the words. The music often recalls Berg's Wozzek, and, like Berg,
Morawetz knows how to create some beautiful, lyric moments in a quasi-atonal
idiom. He also is not afraid to resurrect the bel canto device of
embellishing the vocal line with a woodwind obligato. The performance sounded
flawless, with soprano Lois Marshall projecting the demanding solo with
tremendous determination and the orchestra proving as authoritative in the
modern idiom as it had in the nineteenth-century.
