Pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico’s More Rivers, performing the composition by Frank Horvat, will be released on Navona Records on January 24. It’s a kind of follow up to her seminal recording of Ann Southam’s Rivers in complete in the early 1980s.
It’s the qualities of water that inspired both pieces and their interpretations by the acclaimed Canadian pianist. It is necessary for life, but can also be destructive; it’s welcoming, but has a darker side.
Petrowska Quilico commissioned the new work from Toronto composer Frank Horvat, a suite of seven pieces for solo piano.
Christina Petrowska Quilico: The Interview
Christina Petrowska Quilico, C.M., OOnt, FRSC, has been recognized for her contributions to the Canadian classical music by many accolades and awards, and a career that has incorporated everything from the Romantics to brand new music.
She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2021, and received the Ontario Arts Council’s Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance in 2023. She has a catalogue of more than 60 recordings, with four JUNO nominations.
We talked to her about Rivers, then and now.
“The story of Rivers and how I met Ann is quite interesting. One of my students brought in her piece,” she recalls.
That was back in 1981. Southam had not put many indications in her work overall. The music that had been passed along to Christina was marked to be performed at a slow pace.
“I played through it, and it took hours because the tempos were very slow,” Quilico says. She was expecting her second child at the time, and contacted Southam to talk about the changes she wanted to make to her work.
“The fast ones I sped up,” she told her. “She loved it, and that was our joke for 30 years.”
The recording was made, and Quilico has performed it live multiple times since then — but never quite the same way. “I play it differently every time.” It’s the nature of the music, and also its inspiration. In 2009, Christina released the album Pond Life, with compositions written for her by Southam. “I remember when I did Pond Life, we talked to all the bodies of water. When you look at a drop of rain in a pond, it transforms that energy,” she adds “The pond may be smooth on the surface, but it’s teeming with life.”
The collaborations with Southam were fruitful. “She had this wonderful ability to create space around the sound.”
Quilico recalls a professor at Juilliard, when Christina was preparing Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto. The teacher talked to her about an “electrical current” that runs from the piece from start to finish.
“It’s the same with Ann’s music.” She mentions her sharp articulations, and says she reminds herself of a quote by artist Wassily Kandinsky before playing her music. “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings.”
More Rivers
That spirit of creation is what she was looking for in commissioning More Rivers from Frank Horvat. “It reflects the More Rivers by Frank.” Horvat, as a composer, is often concerned with the environment, using his music to express what many of us are feeling about its fragility.
“I think a lot of us are really distressed right now with what’s going on,” Quilico says.
Along with her music, she often writes poetry. Expression and art can be a solace. “A lot of this music, I find this appealing right now. It’s finding the beauty in life at least, as artists.”
To perform, the approach is crucial. “In playing it, sometimes I think we get very anxious,” she says. “You’re trying to make a statement, you can let your own anxiety surface in the performance. I’ve worked hard to create my own technique, to be able to play an hour’s worth of fast and slow music without a break.” It’s a physical and mental effort. “The faster the music, the slower your breathing should be. With slow music, you have to hear the inner detail.”
Horvat’s music can be described as minimalist. “When we’re playing the sounds, they create vibrations. We’re almost like a tuning fork to certain sounds,” she says. “You use your breath to create that flow and fluidity in your performance.”
Nervous tension can be used in the performance, but the body needs to remain still. Good technique is important, in particular for minimalist works. “It needs to be played from beginning to end.”
That way, the audience can enjoy and appreciate the different moods and tempos, along with that “electrical current” throughline.
Her instinct that Horvat would be the right composer to approach for the sequel to Rivers was apt.
“This was his tribute to Ann,” Quilico says. “We had talked about how I worked on them.” She notes that Frank also doesn’t put a lot of instructions into his music. “Some composers, every bar is full of instructions,” she says. As with Southam’s original Rivers, Quilico felt the tempos could be adjusted in some areas. “He was all very supportive of that.”
The recording was done within a few hours, she reports, with the tempo adjusted for one piece on the fly. “He said, I never thought of it that way, and I really prefer it this way. It was a really lovely working relationship,” she adds. “Every time you play it’s slightly different, so let’s go with that.”
It was a fruitful collaboration. “We came up with some wonderful music making.” The work had its live premiere in St. John’s in July 2024. “Every time I play, I don’t have an exact tempo.” As she notes, different pianos can result in a different performance. “They had a brand new Steinway, and third River I could really speed up,” she says. “Often the recordings are a bit more intimate.”
The Expressive Power of Music
Horvat often immerses himself in nature in order to be able to compose works that reflect its complexity, she points out. Quilico says a Buddhist retreat that she participated in also affected her approach to performance. “You put that into the music,” she says. “As a vibration of sounds on physical matter, that’s really what it is.”
That’s why music, and classical music, can be such an effective mode of expression complex emotions. “You can feel things when you listen to music that sometimes you don’t even want to express,” she says. “The whole world is going a bit crazy. I always tell my students […] sound has no borders. We all feel the same emotions.”
Composers, like all artists, are inherently a product of their time and its politics. She’d tell her students, for example, to read the books that the composers were reading at the time to better understand their music.
Teaching is something that she’s recently retired from. “I’ve got so many projects to record,” she says. “It’s nice to get back to creating full-time.”
- Christina Petrowska Quilico’s More Rivers will be released on January 24, 2025; find it [HERE].
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