Australian Parenthesis

To some British musicians, says Malcolm Williamson, an Australian composer is like a kangaroo at Court -- a complete contradiction in terms. But to Williamson, a much admired Australian composer living in Britain, his Down Under background is an up-over musical advantage. "It's wonderful," he says, "not being bothered by tradition."

Last week the boyish, 35-year-old nontraditionalist turned up in Wilton, Conn., for some piano practice and stocktaking. He was homeward bound for a concert tour after 17 years in London, where he has produced a widely performed repertory of orchestral, ballet and chamber music, plus several operas that have been making the rounds of English and Continental houses. As for stocktaking, he could count in a substantial success two weeks ago at Newport, R.I., where the U.S.

premieres of two of his works formed a sort of parenthesis within the Metropolitan Opera's Verdi Festival (TIME, Sept. 1).

In England two years ago, Assistant Met Manager John Gutman heard Williamson's 45-minute chamber-opera setting of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince.

Impressed, Gutman proposed the score as leavening for Newport's predominantly romantic fare. It proved a charming, simple musical translation of Wilde's fable, a transparently written score for a vocal ensemble of children and grownups whose occasional peppery dissonances failed to diminish the limpid simplicity of its lyric lines. Like many of Williamson's works, it suggested the composer's varied background:

church organist, opera coach and night club pianist.

Wider Horizons. "I'm constantly in trouble with London critics," says Williamson, "because of the great variety of things I work into my music. They can't understand how I can drag in all those little ideas from popular music.

They get upset whenever a composer refuses to fit a category. I hate categories."

So far, Williamson has tried all sorts of categories. After arriving in London, he worked with twelve-tone Composer Elisabeth Lutyens, but soon found that discipline "stiff and disagreeable." Now his manner is basically tonal, which, he feels, actually affords the composer a wider horizon of dissonance. In another Williamson work produced at Newport, a nonet for five players and four dancers, long sequences of butter-would-melt tunefulness suddenly gave way to a perky hell-for-leather style reminiscent of Stravinsky's acidulous neoclassicism.

Williamson is particularly enthusiastic about his operatic output, which already includes not only small, occasional pieces such as Prince, but also a fullscale, splashy setting of Novelist Graham Greene's spy fantasy, Our Man in Havana. Finding the proper operatic text is a huge problem. "I need something I can destroy," Williamson says, "a play that I can take apart and rebuild my own way. Verdi got this kind of thing from the trashy plays of his fellow romantics, adapted by saintly and compliant librettists. It's not so easy any more." Probably for this reason, the libretto for The Happy Prince is his own. And probably all the better because it is.

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