Composer's Corner

Switzerland's Frank Martin, 61, writes music professionally, cooks for relaxation. His music resembles his recipes: not too dry or too watery, not too heavy, not too much seasoning. He has written in just about every musical form except opera, but his output is comparatively small. His musical pace is a peaceful amble: " find my compositions are better when I write slowly than when I try to do it in a hurry." International recognition has come to him only since the war, but he is now his nation's ranking composer.*

Last week before a Paris audience Frank Martin placed a major work: his new, half-hour-long Violin Concerto. Swiss Conductor Ernest Ansermet and Hungarian-born Violinist Joseph Szigeti made it a labor of love, took five curtain calls. Martin rose twice from his box seat, bowed shyly. Said Szigeti: "A truly-extraordinary concerto . . . It is caressingly sweet and yet it avoids all grandiloquence." Said Conductor Ansermet: "A great work."

Martin, a reedlike, sensitive-looking man, was the tenth child of a Calvinist minister. After the Geneva Conservatory and a hitch in Switzerland's standing army, he settled down to a life of teaching and composing. A visit to Paris shook him out of his native conservatism: he experimented with radical rhythmical structures, later with the twelve-tone technique, but absorbed only what he wanted from them and went his own way. His musical language now reflects both Schoenberg and Debussy, but its message is personal. The Violin Concerto conveys a sense of warmth and tragedy; his oratorio Golgotha expresses his profound religious feeling ; his Petite Symphonie Concertante has some of the pastoral air that the composer has breathed on hikes about Switzerland.

Recently Martin has been living in Amsterdam, which he enjoys because "I like plenty of tranquillity, and in Geneva I didn't get enough of it." In Amsterdam, the social demands on a shy composer are few: "I don't speak Dutch. I work in my corner." While he works, his music travels: his Symphonie Concertante will be played next season by the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Rochester symphonies. Manhattan heard his Golgotha last winter, will hear Szigeti and the Violin Concerto next fall.

*Switzerland claims notable Arthur (King David) Honegger, but so does France, because of his Paris education and long residence there.

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