Alexander Brott was a composer to contend with
On centennial of birth, Montreal native remembered for sophisticated music
Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Brott — conductor, violinist, teacher, composer, composer, composer, composer. Not necessarily in that order.
I thought I should make that point right away. For all his dedication to the first three roles and a certain redoubtable presence in the machinations of 20thcentury musical Montreal, Brott will probably be remembered on his sesquicentennial and maybe even his bicentennial for his corpus of accessible and sophisticated music.
He wrote good stuff, not that we know a tenth of it. The fact that his music was featured recently in a concert by the McGill Chamber Orchestra (the ensemble he conducted for decades) and will figure on a program of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival in June counts almost against its durability. No. 1 son, Boris, conducted the former concert and No. 2 son, Denis, has organized the latter.
The Brott digital discography is distressingly slight, although Analekta released a CD in 2005 (the year of his death) of the Violin Concerto of 1950 and Arabesque for cello and orchestra of 1957, with Angèle Dubeau and Denis Brott in the title roles. Filling this disc are Seven Minuets and Six Canons (1971) and Paraphrase in Polyphony (1967), two of Brott’s elaborations on Beethoven, the composer he seemed to admire most, if also with enough wisdom to know that Beethoven was by far too Olympian to serve as model.
If Brott’s Violin Concerto is smartly neoclassical, the Arabesque (which he wrote for his beloved cellist wife, Lotte) expresses Jewish consciousness in an ardently melodic way. On YouTube there is a faint pickup of the 1961 première of Spheres in Orbit as performed under the composer by the OSM (of which Brott was concertmaster until 1959).
This aggressive 12-tone opus brings to mind the hard-core film and television writing of the period. Spheres in Orbit? Maybe around The Outer Limits.
Neoclassical, Hebraic, 12-tone: That sounds like a stylistic full circuit, but a strong case can also be made for Brott the would-be Brit. “I considered this a great honour and devoted myself to it,” he says in his memoir, My Lives in Music, of a CBC commission to write a celebratory piece for the coronation of Elizabeth II.
“In the resultant composition, Royal Tribute, I tried to portray the circumstances of the coronation, the richness of the British heritage, and the new Queen’s personal charm, as well as the turbulence of the times.”
Royal Tribute was not confined to the colonies. Sir Malcolm
Sargent thought it was a jolly good show and conducted it at the Proms. Of course, Sargent’s not-so-friendly rival, Sir Thomas Beecham, had already taken Brott’s pre-war tone poem Oracle on tour with the Royal Philharmonic and (if that not-quite-bullet-proof memoir can be trusted) gave the piece (which won the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Award in 1939) its American première in Seattle in 1943.
Not surprisingly, Beecham was the dedicatee of Brott’s War and Peace, although Sir Ernest MacMillan, who shared Brott’s pro-British sentiments in a big way, gave the world première with the Toronto Symphony before Désiré Defauw conducted it with the OSM and the Chicago Symphony.
Not that Brott’s Canadian credentials were lacking. After the war, he wrote Concordia, a vision of social harmony in Montreal, his hometown, and From Sea to Sea, a 35-minute canvas that starts in Newfoundland fishing villages and ends in British Columbia. Counterbalancing such grandly visionary works were abstract exercises like Analogy and Anagram, written for the French conductor Pierre Monteux, and drolleries like Critic’s Corner, a set of variations possibly based on individuals.
Where are these pieces now? Why is a composer whose works seemed viable to Sir Thomas Beecham and Leopold Stokowski (who led the Violin Concerto with Noël Brunet as soloist in an all-Canadian concert in Carnegie Hall) now preserved mainly by his progeny? These tough questions need to be asked.
There are some obvious extramusical explanations. As the conductor of the McGill Chamber Orchestra, Brott was an irritation to McGill University (where he taught for many years but which had no connection to the ensemble) and the OSM (with which the MCO openly competed for subscribers). It is probably not by oversight that OSM managing director Pierre Béique is absent from Brott’s narrative.
As a Jewish anglophone devoted to national unity and bedazzled by all things British, Brott was not likely to be popular in the Latin Quarter. For the members of the avowedly modernist Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, he represented (despite those 12-tone flirtations) exactly the kind of composer they did not want in the club.
Even the Rest of Canada avantgarde was likely to view him as an anachronism, conveniently out of earshot in Montreal.
Of his alleged conservatism, Brott had this to say to Michael Schulman in Canadian Composer magazine in 1976: “I take exception to this business of whether one does or does not write contemporary music. We are all of our time. ... I do not particularly favour the mainstream of today for a variety of reasons. ...
“Either we choose to express emotions and feelings and sensations which are common sensations, which most people have and share, or else a form of escapism into a remote area where a few of the more experimental composers feel they can impress other experimental composers.”
Full-orchestra revivals of War and Peace and Concordia might be too much to hope for. But I am intrigued.
Why is a composer whose works seemed viable to Sir Thomas Beecham and Leopold Stokowski now preserved mainly by his progeny?