There are certainly any number of pianists who’ve had the occasional work composed for them. Canadian-born Margaret Bruce, on the other hand, has had what amounts to an entire repertoire of new music written especially for her by composers as famous as Herbert Howells and Lennox Berkeley.
Bruce was born on Canada’s Pacific Coast but received a scholarship to Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music in her mid teens. At 18 she left Canada for London and the Royal College of Music, where she won a scholarship for future study in Vienna (establishing the foundation for her particular interest in contemporary music by central European composers). Her formal British debut took place in the 1968 season with recitals at Winchester Cathedral and Wigmore Hall. She married the Hon H.L.T. Lumley-Savile in 1972.
Almost immediately thereafter Bruce began performing new repertoire, giving the first performances of Sir Lennox Berkely’s Four Piano Studies at the Purcell Room in 1975. 1975 was a memorable year in her personal life as well: her identical triplet sons James, Peter and Robin, were born on April 30th.
In the 80s Bruce toured in then Czechoslavakia with Peter Gelhorn, giving the long-belated first performance of Dvorak’s Scenes from the Bohemian Forest in Prague. Two years later Gelhorn and Bruce established Canadians and Classics; a St. Johns Smith Square series designed to introduce music by Bruce’s compatriots to European audiences. Canadian composers including Violet Archer and Jean Coulthard (who Bruce knew as a child back in Vancouver) created new works for Bruce to perform in the series; it’s worth noting that orchestral music by the major Quebec composer Claude Vivier recieived its very first London performance under the C&C banner.
Not that Bruce has restricted her performance activities exclusively to new music. She’s played Mozart at the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic, performed Liszt in Slovakia, and presented varied recitals and broadcasts throughout North America and Europe.
But there’s just too much in Bruce’s special collection not to see new work as the core of her own particular mission. And of all her composers, the distinguished Czech expatriot Antonin Tucapsky has particular pride of place. In the early 80s Bruce premiered his Fantasia Quasi una Sonata at the Purcell Room; in the last two seasons she premiered his Five Piano Preludes in 04 and five more Preludes this season. As well he has written for her a Piano Concerto, a Piano Trio and a miniature piano trio for her sons when they where five years old.
In the months to come Bruce intends to revive Canadians and Classics activities, but also plans to extend her Goethe and the Romantic Imagination and Time, Night, and Music – - – programmes which combine literary and musical celebration.
By David Duke, music critic of The Vancouver Sun.