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  • Playing musical name games

    The Gazette (Montreal)
    October 30, 2004 Saturday
    Final Edition

    Playing musical name games

    by ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, The Gazette


    The sensational recital appearance last Sunday of the 19-year-old
    Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan raises an interesting question:
    How should we spell his name?

    Usually the individual whose name it is has total authority over the
    matter. But when names are transliterated - from Cyrillic or, as in
    this case, Armenian script - the destination audience is entitled to a
    say in the matter.

    First, know that his surname is identical to that of the composer Aram
    Khachaturian. As fate would have it, young Khachatryan has recorded
    Khachaturian's Violin Concerto. The spellings are not harmonized. Nor
    is it hard to imagine Sergey playing Sergei - Prokofiev.

    Make that Prokofiev as opposed to Prokofieff, the spelling seen during
    the composer's lifetime. Rachmaninoff is also starting to slip in
    favour of Rachmaninov - in spite of the fact that the California-based
    composer habitually signed his name with two f's.

    Transliterations come and go - French and English do not agree on a
    host of musicians, including Stravinsky (Stravinski), Tchaikovsky
    (Tchaikovski) and Shostakovich (Chostakovich).

    Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, in English, are themselves obsolete
    spellings by current academic standards. I recall a music library in
    which the card catalogue cross-referenced Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich
    - universal in English - to "correct" spellings that in fact are never
    used.

    I have not mentioned German, a language with spellings of its own,
    including eyesores like Schostakowitsch and Prokofijew. Since Sergey
    Khachatryan lives in Frankfurt - he appears to be an interesting
    example of an Armenian violinist not schooled in the Russian style - he
    cannot afford to disregard the priorities of his second home. At any
    rate, he is young enough to change his name and mind. Sergei
    Khachaturian looks good to me. Possibly Prokofiev and Aram would
    approve.

    - - -

    Pro Musica subscribers have been pleasantly surprised this season by a
    renovation - if that is the word - of the stage of the Theatre
    Maisonneuve. Hiring its own team of three technicians in the post-IATSE
    era, the chamber society covers the pit of the second-largest
    performance space in Place des Arts before each performance, thus
    extending the stage apron and bringing artists closer to the audience.

    The rear is defined by a curtain, dramatically illuminated by coloured
    lights shining from the floor of the stage. It is a great improvement
    over the drab beige shell we have known for years. Black panels in
    front of this curtain give the musicians visual definition. More
    importantly, they project sound more crisply to the crowd. The new
    stage takes less than an hour to assemble, according to Pro Musica
    managing director Monique Dube.

    Necessity was the mother of all this invention last season when Pro
    Musica found itself squeezed by the sets of Odyssee, a long-running
    musical. All the same, with a few bold and simple strokes, the
    long-suffering PdA resident has transformed a midsize chasm with
    mediocre acoustics into a pleasant chamber hall.

    Can something then be done with larger Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, home,
    for better or worse, of the MSO? If the experts answer no, this is
    probably because they have never bothered to try.

    - - -

    Ross Pratt, a former director of chamber music at the CAMMAC music camp
    and pianist known for post-Romantic and French repertoire, has died in
    Montreal at the age of 88.

    Born in Winnipeg, Pratt had a wide-ranging education and career. He
    trained in London before the Second World War and toured Asia and
    Australia during the conflict to perform for servicemen. Gazette
    clippings reveal that he toured Western Canada in the winter of 1944
    and Mexico and central America in the summer of 1945.

    Pratt was an educator as well as a performer. He taught in London
    intermittently in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as at the University of
    Alberta and Carleton University. His home base, however, was Montreal,
    where he was a teacher at the Conservatoire. Among his notable
    performances was the Canadian premiere of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a
    Theme of Paganini, which he gave in 1940 with the Montreal Orchestra
    under Douglas Clarke. He was also the soloist in Ravel's Piano Concerto
    in G in the Montreal debut (with the MSO) of conductor Leonard
    Bernstein in 1944.

    Canadian composers often figured in Pratt's solo programs. He also
    enjoyed the lecture-recital format. The last Gazette review of Pratt,
    on March 1, 1985, was of a Debussy program at Marianopolis College with
    spoken comments in English and French.

    After this the record then falls silent. A friend of Pratt says he died
    on Oct. 6 of pneumonia, after a long illness.

    There will be a memorial concert tomorrow at the Unitarian Church, 5035
    de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., at 3:30 p.m. Pratt is survived by his wife
    Audrey, who suggests a memorial donation to CAMMAC, 8 Chemin Cammac,

    Harrington, Que. J8G 2T2 .

    - - -

    Yannick Nezet-Seguin has earned a 21-gun rave for his last-minute
    leadership last week of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra through
    Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5.

    "I doubt the excellent, absent (Emmanuel) Krivine, even on a good day,
    could have kissed the sleeping beauty of this symphony awake as surely
    as this young prince of the conductor's art did on Thursday," wrote
    Globe and Mail contributor Ken Winters.

    Praising the interpretation in some detail, the veteran critic asked
    why Nezet-Seguin was not considered for the directorships of the MSO or
    TSO.

    "Genuine talent is rare," he concluded, "but when it comes, it can
    change your perspective and your mind. Nezet-Seguin is that genuine
    article."
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