Itineraries - Recitals and Lecture Recitals

Review: Wonders if right road taken, Bratuz doesn't need a map

… Audiences call [Damjana Bratuz] amazing.

When the Toronto Symphony scheduled the Bartók Concerto For Orchestra, the symphony association engaged her to give a lecture recital on the composition and the composer. More than 100 gathered in the home of Lieutenant-Governor Pauline McGibbon to hear and wonder at the tiny blonde manipulating slides, lecture notes and piano.
Students have been known to drive more than 100 miles out of their way when they hear she is giving one of her lecture-recitals which for many years dealt with Bartok, while she was writing on the composer. She has now turned her attention on the broader horizons of music such as her present series of public lecture-recitals which have concerned other composers and musicians. Her current series is one of the best musical draws in the music faculty at the University of Western Ontario where she teaches. Former Londoner Ruth Morawetz, the wife of composer Oscar Morawetz described the Toronto performance as a totally aesthetic experience coupled with enthusiasm in speech - flavoured with touches of her natal Slovenian accent - and piano playing.
Given a new lease on health after years of suffering, she is planning this autumn to resume a concert tour which was interrupted two years ago in West Germany when her life was saved by surgery in Berlin …. Her rich choice of language - for she is multilingual - calls the current stage of her career "my renaissance," because doctors finally found out what had been the cause of her difficulties over many years….

A Fulbright fellow from Italy, the first woman to earn a doctorate in music at the University of Indiana, Dr. Bratuz' life is music. She even describes her autobiography, Exchange Visitor In the Midwest, as having written itself in "fugal form" with a "stretto where all the themes come together at the end." In almost florid way, she expresses constant wonder over what North Americans call "facilities" for education, constantly comparing them with the frugal physical state of the Trieste academy where she began her studying, and the Italian schools. She thrills, she says, at the volume of material which has made UWO music library one of the very richest sources on the continent.
Completing 11 years at the music faculty, she is at a crossroads of evaluating her career as a teacher as opposed to the potential that existed for performance. This autumn she will resume her concert career where it was cut short by illness in 1975-76 when she was so well received she has since wondered occasionally if she "took the wrong road."

Those doubts are short-lived, however, partly because of her deep involvement with teaching and students and for some of her pet theories about the value of musical training which is "not limited to the classroom or the concert stage." She takes pride in graduates who are "making it" as performers but she also hopes her influences go further. She has been president of the Ontario committee of the Canadian Music Competitions.
Among her graduates are men and women who, with a rich musical background, have become influential in the community and business. "These people give me great hope, for it is my dearest hope that musical decisions should be made by those who know about music."
The trouble, she says in criticizing what she calls the "upside-down pyramid," is that music educators do not realize how important the music graduate can become in the community at large where "musical decisions are usually made by people who know nothing about music." She cites the cases of graduate Heather Morrison in Thunder Bay who served as accompanist for soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf master classes there last year, Keith Mullback, a lawyer in Calgary, who is an important catalyst on the musical scene and Linda Bonadeo who established Simcoe Gallery series of concerts.

She has made this point to an international group which calls itself Mediacult and which has a worldwide following. She has been involved in a sociological study of the basis for the London attitudes towards music and the arts… Her current wide-ranging series of lecture recitals on A Matter Of Proportion will be given … this spring. She has another to deliver at the music faculty on Schubert and Berg on Feb. 26, and another lecture based on her research in mid-March. She will give a two-hour piano recital in the recital hall on Feb. 16…. In the second week in August she will give master classes on style and interpretation.

For an artist uncertain whether she has taken the right road, Dr. Bratuz doesn't really need a road map.

( By Richard Newman, London Free Press, London, Ontario, February, 1979)