Soprano shows expert control
[...]
One of the works on the program, Oskar Morawetz's Sonnets from the Portuguese, received its first American performance. Morawetz was born in Czechoslovakia and came to Canada, where he now lives, when the Nazis occupied his native land.
His settings of some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's celebrated sonnets are mostly declamatory, noncontrapuntual songs. The harmonic writing is strictly tonal and rather conservative, since its basis seems to be high order triads. The vocal writing is sensitive to the words - both their
meanings and their inflections - but, like most music of the sort, is difficult to remember.
[...] Miss Sukis has studied the music with its composer and there is every, reason to suppose that her performance of it
is authoritative.
[...]
