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"The Weaver" was given its world premiere at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday night, as part of the first concert in a series related to the annual summer festival which takes in Parry Sound, Ontario.
"The Weaver" is based on a poem by the 19th-century Canadian poet Archibald Lampman. A weaver is absorbed at his loom, ignoring his wife's pleas to escape from the city before an advancing army overruns it. He is killed, and in the final stanza the bereft woman imagines her husband weaving in eternity.
The symmetrical nature of the poem is reflected in the setting itself, beginning and ending as it does with a bustling, spinning-wheel motif for piano and clarinet. In between, the music is at one with Morawetz's aims at accessibility, the vocal line carrying the words and heightening the emotions with economical gestures and floating lyricism. At times, one was reminded of Britten, both in the word-painting and in the wide-ranging treatment of the tenor voice.
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