Marimba as a chamber music instrument with orchestra
RETIRED as Professor emeritus from the SA College of Music he may be, but South Africa’s most prolific and distinguished of composers is far from retired or retiring. Every day Peter Klatzow composes. If it’s not on a commission (and these come to him at a pace), he doing what he wants to do, which at the moment is rewriting Songs of an Exile. The CPO is celebrating his 70th birthday on Thursday with a concert at the City Hall devoted to his works.
When Klatzow was four and heard a piano, he knew that was what he wanted and began to nag his parents, who finally relented and got him a teacher. He didn’t get a piano until he was eight (the year he wrote his first piece, a sonatina for piano), and that was only after his mother heard a piano being played in a secondhard store and asked who was playing. Her stunned reaction to his expertise changed his parents’ outlook on music as a career. They agreed to support him for one year at the Royal College of Music in London; he won a full scholarship from SAMRO for the rest of his studies, one that was extended so he could study further in Italy and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. While in London, he won the Royal Philharmonic Composer’s Prize (1965) for his Variations for Orchestra, at 19 the youngest winner for many years to come.
Klatzow came back in 1966, and took up positions in what is now Harare, before joining the SABC as a music producer and then from 1973 until 2010 he was a lecturer, senior lecturer, assis- tant professor of composition, full professor and finally emeritus professor. He has left his mark on many students, and they on him. “One of the best things about not having to teach is dealing with students who are looking only for praise. Too many become rude and confrontational when there work is criticised. It was thus a delight to have Adrian More as a student – he was a gift to me, and didn’t require teaching!”
South Africa has embraced Klatzow on this anniversary – he was celebrated in Richard Cock’s Mozart festival in Johannesburg in January, where German pianist Florian Uhlig performed his latest work All People become Spirit People when they Die under the direction of Richard Cock. The pianist in this work was the distinguished German pianist Florian Uhlig. He will have several works played at the National Arts Festival with the KZNPO.
From the Poets,
Lightscapes
Temptation of Saint Anthony for cello and orchestra won the Pablo Casals Prize in Spain, and the Creative Arts Foundation commissioned his flute and marimba concerto. Instead, still composing (he has more than 500 pieces in his ouvre; the earlier ones of which are in the SA College archives), he wrote a book – Composers in South Africa Today. He got into trouble for that, he says. He was also interim CEO of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra for six months while it looked for a new CEO.
Asked what he would have changed over the years, he said he wouldn’t have wasted time composing for ballet. “Audiences are main stream and want Swan Lake and The Nutcracker over and over again. Ballets languish in drawers and scores for ballets like Hamlet remain unplayed after the first outings, meaning so much time, energy and creative effort could have gone into other works. Like works for marimba!”
Klatzow has had a special relationship with this instrument for decades, and internationally feted marimbist Robert van Sice, has played his works regularly and encourages his students to learn them.
“Music for the marimba has often only been composed by marimbists. I have developed a special style over the years to take their needs into account. It’s a popular instrument and if, for instance, you walk down the corridors of a great school like the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, I am told you probably won’t go far every day before you hear a percussionist practicing my Dances of Earth and Fire.”
Now on his horizon is developing works for the marimba as a chamber music instrument with orchestra. Look at Figures in a Landscape on Youtube. But that is after he has reworked his Songs of an Exile, songs he thinks were initially too difficult. This one is being done on synthesizer not piano, a process that makes composing a little easier from a notational point of view.
Beyond his music, where are his passions? Children, he says. He has looked after the education and growth of Claudia Botes who is now embarking on adult life as a well-travelled and self-possessed adult, and he is looking after the education of Peter-John Walker, whose family stays with him. “They have added so much joy to my life,” he says.
Klatzow’s orchestration of Brahms’ String Quintet, opus 111, an arrangement of a chamber work for full orchestra, is the main work on this celebratory concert on June 25. With Victor Yampolsky on the podium and soloists Liesl Stoltz (flute) and Frank Mallows (marimba), the CPO will also play the Double Concerto for Flute and Marimba, Three paintings by Irma Stern, and the Healing Melody, a work he wrote for the British Doctors’ Orchestra.
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