Students Sing Her Praises

Source: www.thestar.com - Joanna Smith

(September 03, 2008) She will always picture her sitting at the piano.

"Her bifocals are halfway down her nose and she has this way of cocking her head just so," soprano Adrianne Pieczonka says of her celebrated vocal coach, Mary Morrison. "After I sing a passage she says, 'Now, there's a sound!' "

What a compliment from an 81-year-old who has not only heard but produced some of the greatest vocal sounds in the history of Canadian music.

Sitting in her tiny basement studio in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto – where the walls are covered with photographs of Pieczonka and other famous students from decades past who still come to her to learn new pieces – Morrison starts at the very beginning.

"Oh, I've been singing since ..." she begins. Since she could speak.

Born to a Scottish family in Winnipeg on Nov. 9, 1926, Morrison began singing at Gaelic competitions, winning her first award at age 8. She moved on to her own radio show and the Manitoba Music Festival and when she ran out of awards and scholarships to win after graduating from high school, she hopped on the train to an exciting new life at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

"I came all by myself, which was very daring in those days," she chuckles.

That sense of daring never left her as she became one of the foremost advocates of 20th-century music, bringing its avant-garde silences and dissonant notes to audiences not always ready to hear it.

"I just thought it was so challenging and it was musically something that I wanted to try. ... There were some works that I did that composers had approached other singers (about) and they said, `No way!' I'm not going to mention any names," she says coyly.

She has performed lead roles in Canadian Opera Company productions such as Marguerite in Faust and the Countess in the Marriage of Figaro, but her talent also allowed her to communicate lesser-known music.

"You have to be convinced yourself about that work before you can convince somebody else. You do it through your voice and your use of the text, but also in the shape of the piece, how the phrases are going, the pacing. Your eyes, your presence, whatever will draw your audience to that music."

Canadian composers of contemporary music found a stable outlet for their expression when in 1964 Morrison formed the Lyric Arts Trio with her then-neighbours, the flutist Robert Aitken and his wife, the pianist Marion Ross.

Aitken, 69, a well-known composer in his own right and artistic director of New Music Concerts, recalls fondly the years he spent bringing contemporary music to audiences around the world; travels often filled with hilarious adventures thanks to the high-spirited Morrison.

There was the time when the wrong backup tape started playing during a performance in Japan and the uptight concert host nearly threw a fit.

Once they were locked out of the hall until someone finally realized that banging on the door wasn't part of the act.

"What if a bus got caught in a fishnet?" Morrison would say while laughing, because one time it did.

"The warmth of her personality was known and felt by all who knew her," Aitken says. "It was amazing to see her find the time to play and still maintain a loving family."

Morrison met her late husband, composer Harry Freedman, at the conservatory, where she says "he was kind of the matinee idol" of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at the time.

"At that time, he didn't think too highly of singers," she says. "I think he thought that we weren't really good musicians – certainly not on par with some of the instrumentalists, which was all the more amusing for his friends when we got engaged and then got married."

Their youngest daughter, Lori Freedman, a clarinettist based in Montreal, says music was a natural part of life at home with her parents.

"Even into my teens, coming home from high school parties and things, I would be the first home then Mum would pop in at some point, or maybe she was already in, and she was practising all this weird music," she says. "I was going to bed and she was up practising with the metronome and this huge score in the bed and that was sort of normal, but I realized somewhere along the line that it wasn't normal. Nobody else's parents were doing these kinds of things."

The transition from performing around the world to teaching the next generation of singing stars was a slow one. Morrison has been at the University of Toronto since 1978 but began teaching elsewhere several years earlier. Her last public performance was in 1985 and she says she eased into offstage life with little fanfare.

"It was nothing sort of dramatic. Some people do farewell tours and that kind of thing," she says, bursting into laughter. "That was not my style! Oh, what's the big deal? You just get on with your life."

Soprano Measha Brueggergosman is grateful that getting on with life meant Morrison has been able to devote her time to sharing her talents with vocalists like her.

"I knew I was going to be just one in a long line of people who had benefited generously from her work," she says of Morrison, who she calls an "intuitive" teacher with "an encyclopedic knowledge of vocal repertoire."

She also pictures her sitting at the piano, although the image makes her laugh.

"She's the first to admit she's a horrible piano player," Brueggergosman says.

"I can still hear you singing the wrong note!" she says Morrison will call out while clanging away. "She's got ears in the back of her head and you're not getting any help from the piano!"

Staff Reporter