Pianist Christina Petrowska Brings Liszt And The Moderns To York University

TORONTO, September 30, 1998 -- 19th century European romanticism meets contemporary Canadian classical music in Liszt and the Moderns, an engaging program which York University music professor, pianist Christina Petrowska, will present in a solo concert on October 7.

The concert will feature works by Canadian composers Ann Southam, Heather Ann Schmidt, Alexina Louie, Larysa Kuzmenko, and Peter Paul Koprowski, book-ended by selections from the piano repertoire of Franz Liszt.

What's the connection? According to Petrowska, it's all in the music.

She finds a clear link, for example, between Liszt's 1881 work Nuages gris ñ which, as Petrowska points out, has been called the gateway to modern music ñ and pieces such as the program opener, Southam's Glass Houses, composed exactly one hundred years later. Southam's evocative work, Petrowska says, "plays like a Liszt Ètude."

Other couplings include Louie's delicately tonal Music for Piano, set off by Liszt's En rÍve, and Kuzmenko's dramatic 1997 work In Memoriam, inspired by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, framed by Liszt's La lugubre gondola I and II.

Musically speaking, Petrowska sees the Canadian composers on the program as latter-day romantics.

"They are true descendants of Liszt and his contemporaries," Petrowska says. "Like Liszt, they use the piano as a virtuoso instrument."

Recognized internationally as an interpreter of contemporary music, Petrowska has premiered dozens of works written for her by leading Canadian, American and European composers. At the same time, as her concerts and recordings testify, she continues to find fresh inspiration and bring new insights to the traditional classical and romantic repertoire.

Petrowska, who teaches piano performance and musicology at York University, will reprise Liszt and the Moderns at New York's Merkin Hall on October 20. In December, she will introduce some of the Canadian works in this program to Taiwanese audiences in solo recitals and performances with the Taipei Philharmonic as part of the True North Festival, organized by the True North Foundation with the support of the Department of External Affairs and Canadian corporations.

Christina Petrowska will perform Liszt and the Moderns on Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 p.m. in DACARY Hall, Room 050 McLaughlin College at York University, 4700 Keele Street. The concert is open to the public and admission is free. For more information, please call the Department of Music at 736-5186.

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For more information, please contact:

Brigitte Kleer
Manager, Public Relations
Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 77143
email: bkleer@yorku.ca