Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, March 4, 2000
LOCAL Saturday 4 March 2000
In honour of Robertson Davies
Kingston
composer's memorial concerto can be heard March 12 on CBC Radio.
Paul Gessell The Ottawa Citizen
KINGSTON - Surely it was inevitable that Marjan Mozetich would one day compose a piano concerto in honour of Robertson Davies.
"Robertson
Davies gave me courage," the wiry Kingston composer says of the celebrated
Canadian author who died in 1995. 
The story goes back to the 1970s when Mozetich was living in Toronto and growing increasingly dissatisfied with the avant-garde music in which he was immersed. Suddenly, he discovered the books of Robertson Davies. They changed his life. They certainly changed his music.
Now, move ahead to 1993 when Kingston philanthropist-businessman Michael Davies, a nephew of Robertson, first heard one of Mozetich's compositions and decided he must meet the creator of such a masterpiece. Of course, Michael Davies had no clue at the time that his uncle had played such a crucial role in shaping Mozetich's music.
The two met, hit it off and two years later, when Robertson Davies died, Michael Davies contacted Mozetich again and offered him a commission from the Kingston-based Davies Foundation to produce a piece of music in honour of the celebrated writer.
The concerto, only completed in 1999, has been described by relatives of the great writer as both as "life-affirming" and as "bombastic" as the bearded, Zeus-like man himself. The concerto can be heard March 12 on the local CBC radio program Artscape and again June 4 on the nationally broadcast radio show Symphony Hall.
"I was absolutely delighted with it," Michael Davies says of the concerto.
The story
of Mozetich, the Davies (both Michael and Robertson) and the concerto
is told within the old stone walls of Kingston's most celebrated restaurant,
Chez Piggy, as the composer lustily demolishes a lamb tajine and bares
his musical soul. 
Mozetich was born in 1948 in Italy of Slovenian parents. The family immigrated to Canada in 1952, settling in Hamilton. The young Marjan began his musical training at age nine in preparation for his studies at the University of Toronto. Canada Council grants later sent him for further studies to Italy and England.
Throughout the 1970s, Mozetich was associated with the avant-garde music scene in Toronto. He founded the contemporary ensemble ARRAYMUSIC and was the group's artistic director from 1976-78.
Much of this avant-garde music is the music world's equivalent of abstract painting. To many people, it is as incomprehensible, unstructured and undefined as blobs of paint haphazardly splattered on a canvas and as unmelodic as a tone-deaf cat walking across the keys of a piano. Beethoven, it's definitely not. Mozetich, like many of his contemporaries, was composing this kind of music and frequently attending concerts by like-minded performers.
"Essentially, I was bored," says Mozetich.
He was also uneasy about the lack of communication between him and his audience.
"You had to understand me. I wasn't understanding the listener.
The reference points were obscure for the listener." At some point in the late 1970s, amid Mozetch's restlessness, Robertson Davies -- well, his books, anyway -- entered the picture. Mozetich devoured the Salterton trilogy, Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailities.
Suddenly, because of Davies's art, Mozetich saw a way out of his own artistic dilemma.
Davies wrote in the latter half of the 20th century but eschewed the literary styles favoured by most of his contemporaries. Instead, he embraced a tone more rooted in the 19th century. But he massaged that tone into one that engaged a contemporary audience.
"He was criticized as a writer for being old-fashioned and yet he tapped into the psyche of people," says Mozetich. "Everyone could relate to what was going on."
If Robertson Davies could do it -- speak to a contemporary audience with new literature rooted in the past -- so could Mozetich speak to a modern audience with new music firmly rooted in the past. Consequently, Mozetich started composing music he calls, for lack of a better term, "post-modern." This is music that adheres to the discipline of the European classics but also incorporates some contemporary bells and whistles, a soupcon of new age tones and influences from Indonesia and the Middle East. It's music that allows Mozetich to communicate better with his audience.
"I was looking for other voices to give me the courage to change because when you come from that world (of avant-garde music) you've got all your colleagues going one way; you've got the herd mentality. In the 1970s, modernism was the way to go."
If Robertson Davies could break from the pack, Mozetich concluded, so could he.
In 1992, Mozetich composed a piece called Lament in the Trampled Garden. It was performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and recorded on a CD. Michael Davies, by chance, heard that recording and was mesmerized.
"It was haunting," Davies recalls.
Davies, whose family ran the Kingston Whig-Standard for most of the last century, did some research and discovered Mozetich was a composer attached to Queen's University in Kingston.
"So, I picked up the phone and phoned him up and said, 'Come over and talk.' "
The two men hit it off. There was talk of the Davies Foundation, a charitable organization active in funding arts-related projects, commissioning a piece of music. But nothing concrete was negotiated until after the death of Robertson Davies in 1995 and then, because of other commitments, Mozetich could not tackle the project until 1999.
Mozetich was not required to produce a piano concerto that would necessarily embody the spirit of Robertson Davies. But the work would forever be known as one that was composed in his honour.
The commission, essentially coming from one man, Michael Davies, is rare in Canada. Most commissions come from performing groups, the film or dance industry or from government-funded agencies like the Canada Council for the Arts.
The concerto was performed publicly for the first time Feb. 13 at Grant Hall in Kingston by the Kingston Symphony with guest pianist Janina Fialkowska. CBC radio recorded the performance for later broadcast. Robertson Davies's widow, Brenda, and several relatives attended the concert.
The concerto has three movements -- Into Night, Dream and Morning -- and takes about 35 minutes to be performed. Program notes from the Kingston Symphony describe the concerto this way:
"The first movement, Into the Night, is an extensive drama and intense dialogue between the piano and orchestra. The musical material is based on a mixture of American and Eastern European sensibilities, which may account for the many overtones of Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Gershwin.
"The second movement, Dream, used an unusual scale with a slight Middle Eastern flavour. The thematic material was taken from a short section of an early work by Mozetich and has a reflective and atmospheric nature.
"The finale, Morning, is built on an Indonesian scale and, reflecting the exuberance and innocence that a new day may bring, is an optimistic antidote to the previous movements."
Michael Davies says the music is as "bombastic" as Robertson was. "He would have liked it," says Michael. "This piece has a lust for life and Robertson definitely had a lust for life."
Mozetich said Brenda Davies wrote a letter expressing her pleasure with the music. "She said she liked it because it has a life-affirming energy to it and that was something Robertson Davies was always looking for in other people's works. He disliked art and literature that dealt only with the dark and brought you down."
The future of the concerto remains uncertain. Both Michael Davies and Mozetich hope the music will eventually show up on a CD. Davies seems particularly keen on Mario Bernardi, one of Canada's most celebrated conductors, taking on the project. Bernardi conducted the CBC Vancouver Orchestra's rendition of several of Mozetich's compositions that were recorded for a CD scheduled for release in June.
Mozetich's repertoire includes everything from music for contemporary dance companies to more traditional concertos and even Westernized Javanese gamelan music. He refuses commissions for movie scores because deadlines are too rushed but generally is willing to tackle all genres: "I'm a tart at heart."
In the end, much of Mozetich's post-modern music may be far too adventurous for many of the small-town, conservative, middle class Anglicans and Presbyterians that people the books of Robertson Davies. Yet these are the folks who ultimately have brought Mozetich to the bombastic, life-affirming musical world he now inhabits.
- - -
The piano concerto in honour of Robertson Davies can be heard March 12 at 12:05 p.m. on the CBC Radio Two program Artscape (103.3 FM). A national broadcast of the concerto is planned for Symphony Hall at 10 a.m. June 4, also on CBC Radio Two.