A Festival Pablo Casals Would’ve Loved

Pablo Casals first visited Puerto Rico, the birthplace of his mother, in 1955. He fell in love with it, moved there and founded the annual Casals Festival in 1956.

The festival has continued since the world-renowned cellist’s death in 1973. Two hours of music from the 40th anniversary festival, held last June, will be shown on the A&E; cable network tonight.

Composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, music director of the festival since 1993, conducts the Montreal Symphony in the first piece, Beethoven’s “Violin Concerto,” with 26-year-old soloist Anne Akiko Meyers on violin.

Penderecki chooses music for the Casals Festival, and chooses musicians he admires, some of whom are friends.

“I think I’m doing exactly what Pablo Casals was doing,” he says. “He invited his friends and they made music together. Always I’m trying to find the best musicians.”

A film of Casals playing “Courante” from Bach’s suites for solo cello in Prades, France, in 1950, is shown as the fourth of five pieces of music. Robert Snyder, who filmed it, says the performance hasn’t previously been aired in the United States.

The Prazak Quartet, formed in 1972 by students at the Prague Conservatory, plays a Dvorak quartet on the program. Penderecki is pleased that this quartet, much praised in Europe, has a chance via the Casals Festival and TV to become better known in the Americas.

For fans of classical music videos, both the quartet and violinist Meyers are pictured performing in beautiful outdoor surroundings.

But the music is really coming from their playing in the concert hall. And the violin the wind-blown Meyers holds at Fort San Cristobal on a high point above the sea, and instruments the quartet holds seated on the lush lawn of Ponce de Leon Governor’s Mansion, aren’t the valuable ones they’re playing indoors.

The familiar, exciting music of Ravel’s “Bolero” is played by the Montreal Symphony conducted by Charles Dutoit. The two-hour special ends with excerpts from “El Pessebre” (The Manger), an oratorio composed by Casals, first heard in 1960. Lukas Foss conducts the Puerto Rico Symphony; five soloists and the San Juan Philharmonic Choir sing.

Casals’ widow, Marta Casals Istomin, helped choose which portions of “El Pessebre” to present on TV.

Penderecki, recently here to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra, calls the Casals Festival the biggest on the American continent. “It isn’t like the other ones, Tanglewood, Saratoga, Ravinia, with one orchestra in residence playing all the concerts, which is like a prolonged season for that orchestra.

“We’re doing it like a European festival, bringing the best orchestras and the best chamber music,” he says.

Next season, he has invited the Israel Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.

“And what I like to do is bring music which was never played in Puerto Rico before,” he says. “I’m not doing this festival to program my own music. At each festival we try to have two, three or four pieces by Puerto Rican composers. They’re very good and not known. We are giving a commission to write a new piece every year. Because I’m a composer, I think I have to do something for my colleagues.”

As a composer, the 63-year-old Penderecki is best known for “Trenody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” “St. Luke’s Passion,” “The Devils of Loudun” (his first opera) and “Polish Requiem.”

He has not slowed down. He says: “I just finished a piece for the 3,000 years of Jerusalem, ‘Seven Days of Jerusalem,’ using psalms of David and other fragments of the Bible.

“I signed a contract with the Munich Philharmonic. I’m writing all my symphonies for them. I have five. I’m not going to write more than nine. All the important composers of the second half of the 19th century and the 20th century didn’t write more. I wouldn’t dare to do it.”

His style is not a simple matter. “I don’t belong to any school or group. I did belong in the 1950s to the avant-garde. It belongs to a time which is gone already. I have the elements of my old avant-garde period in my music now. But also there’s the strong feeling of the continuation of tradition, especially continuation of the big symphonic form, which I think is coming slowly back, and to oratorio music, which we don’t have in our century much.”

Penderecki conducts about 50 concerts a year, all over the world. “Next year I’ll conduct the Osaka [Japan] Philharmonic in Beethoven’s ‘Seventh Symphony’ and my flute concerto. Audiences like to see the composer still alive,” he says.

The composer has homes in Krakow, Poland, and Lucerne, Switzerland. Even though he travels about nine months a year to conduct, he composes two or three hours a day.

* “The 40th Annual Pablo Casals Festival” airs tonight at 7 and 11 p.m. on A&E.;