John Harbison rediscovers the appeal of the human voice
As a boy at summer camp, John Harbison spent more time perfecting his throw from third base to first than studying music. As a teen-age pianist in Princeton, N.J., he found it more rewarding to play jazz than to work on his classical technique. At Harvard, his teach er, Walter Piston, testing his resolve, advised him: "Under no circumstances should you ever be a composer."
Look at him now: winner of the Kennedy Center-Friedheim Award for the best orchestral piece of 1980; one of six composers commissioned to write a symphonic work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's centennial this year; and, this summer, composer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico. At 42, Harbison is developing a greater depth of ex pression with each new work. His heightening eloquence stamps him as a leader in music's humanistic revival — and has made him one of the hottest composers around.
In 1979 Harbison saw productions of his first two operas, Winter's Tale and Full Moon in March. The past 15 months brought two major premieres: the Violin Concerto, which he wrote for his violinist wife Rose Mary, and the Piano Concerto, which won the Kennedy Center prize. Earlier this month in Santa Fe, two new Harbison works got their first performances. Mottetti di Montale is a darkly elegiac, 50-minute song cycle based on po ems by Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Piano Quintet is a spare and acerbic five-movement work commissioned by the festival and dedicated to Artist Georgia O'Keeffe.
The Mottetti, stylishly performed by Mezzo-Soprano Janice Felty and Pianist Edward Auer, recalls the late Ital ian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in its lyricism and sophisticated melodic charm. Harbison sets dark, vivid images from Montale's Le Occasioni (1939) allusively, often employing the familiar device of musical tone painting. In the ninth poem, for example, the mezzo sings of a darting green lizard, and the piano responds with a scaly slither. But the music is much more than a literal transcription of the poetry, for Harbison has given it a deeper layer of meaning in transforming it into song. The most unstable interval in music, the tritone, stalks the cycle relentlessly, a musical metaphor for the dissolution and decay that mark Montale's poetry.
The Piano Quintet, for piano and string quartet, is leaner, harsher and, finally, less successful. It has a distinctively "American" sound derived from Charles Ives, opening with a questioning overture of bold, disjunct octaves. The composer then weakens his argument with | three short character pieces | that, while agreeable, do nothing to further the work's emotional progress. The finale, however, is a heartfelt Elegia that ends with a haunting repeated fragment in the piano, dissolving in resignation and despair.