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Alex Pauk and Murray Schafer.Alexina Louie

Alex Pauk's hair might be a bit thinner now than it was when he first met R. Murray Schafer, but his regard for the Canadian composer is as rich and as fresh as when they first met. Pauk is conductor of Toronto-based Esprit Orchestra, for 34 years the leading orchestra devoted to new music in this country. He first met Schafer in 1973, when Pauk was trying to figure out his musical path in life, and Schafer was pioneering his work in acoustic ecology at Simon Fraser University.

"His advice to me at the time was very important," Pauk recalls. "I was debating whether to pursue an academic career and Murray said, 'No, just go out into the world and be a musician.' It's advice I've followed ever since."

Since that meeting, Pauk and Schafer's paths have intertwined several times. Pauk conducted Schafer's The Princess of the Stars at a lake near Ontario's Algonquin Park using semaphore flags to direct his players. He co-commissioned The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix with the CBC. He has, by his estimation, conducted 60 performances of Schafer's music over his career– the first being the iconic North/White, with a student orchestra in Vancouver.

Not quite to return the favour of that early advice, some 45 years later Pauk is devoting the first half of Esprit's opening concert of the season on Sunday to three seminal works by his friend and long-time colleague. The timing of the concert was occasioned by the news, revealed this summer, that Schafer, now 83, is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Pauk wanted to create an event Schafer could attend and enjoy.

Pauk becomes animated and eloquent when he talks about Schafer's role in Canadian and world music. It's something to which he has given a lot of thought. "Murray is so unerring and sure in his musical language, and there's a grace that invades his entire body of work. Even in the most exploratory works there are elements of earlier musical styles, hints and whispers of Romanticism," he says. "However, he uses that language with such boldness and such imagination that he makes it his own. He can take traditional melody and harmony and move them to a different place with unique sonorities, pacing and colours. And those are the pieces that you remember when you leave the concert hall.

"Some composers carefully put a package together. It's all neat," Pauk adds. "Not Murray – there's something theatrical and dramatic about all of his works, even those written for the concert hall. He constantly engages his listeners."

Pauk's Schafer concert features three works that have a special association and meaning for the conductor and Esprit. Esprit commissioned Murray's Scorpius in 1990, a piece written to celebrate, as so many of Schafer's works do, the eternal, transcendent and even mystical beauty of the natural world. Schafer's Concerto for Flute, written for Robert Aitken, who will be performing it Sunday, may be one of Murray's most successful pieces for the concert hall. Aitken has called it "the greatest flute concerto of the 20th century."

This will be the seventh performance of the piece Pauk has conducted, a rarity for new Canadian works. And then there's Adieu Robert Schumann, an early work of Schafer's, written just a couple of years after Schafer and Pauk first met. Pauk has conducted it once before, with contralto Maureen Forrester, for whom it was written. On Sunday, acclaimed mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabo will be taking the role of Clara Schumann, as she narrates husband Robert Schumann's tragic last days in 1856.

Each of the three works is unique, notes Pauk, as is all of Schafer's output. "There's no school of Murray Schafer," he says. "It would be crazy to try and imitate Murray. He is a true original – a true Canadian original. He is totally committed and uncompromising about everything he does – whether it's the acoustic ecology or the theatre pieces. He didn't reject having a European career as much as he found a clear path living here, living with the Earth. He's always known what he wants to do, what he has to do. His is an independent voice, Canadian and strong."

Power On: A Tribute to R. Murray Schafer takes place Oct. 23 at 8 p.m., at Koerner Hall in Toronto (espritorchestra.com).

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