Composer with a Hot Hand

By Michael Walsh

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.

Harbison writes in a complex yet easily approachable idiom that represents a bridge between postwar formalism and the new conservatism of the past decade. As a young man in the '60s, he was strongly influenced by a pervasive emphasis on form. Music was supposed to be highly organized. "Gestures," "events" and "new sounds," to use the jargon of the period, preoccupied composers as they sought new ways of structuring pieces--often forgetting that music should appeal to more than the intellect. Harbison struggled to combine innovative musical architecture with his lifelong love of melody.

"It took me a long time to reconcile what I felt with the general climate of the times," he says. "But it wasn't a bad thing because it forced me to think. As a composer, I've become more concerned now with melody, but I'm also very interested in what I call questions of large design, the sequence of the way things happen in a piece. The sense of new discourse is very important. Composers who go dry do so because they repeat their forms, not because they repeat their melodic or harmonic idiosyncrasies."

Harbison considers himself first of all a composer of operas, and he is contemplating a new one. "I have been gravitating toward pieces that require refining of my operatic skills," he notes. "I've been choosing, perhaps subconsciously, to write things that contain some sense of a protagonist, things that are overtly dramatic." Concertos, as Mozart proved, are one way to do this, and song cycles another.

In his embrace of opera, Harbison has rediscovered the primacy of the human voice. Not that he wants to write like Verdi. "I'm not nostalgic for tonality," he says. "It is one of the easiest ways of getting a response from an audience, and I'm not terribly interested in it. But you have to let the voice expand. The voice is what holds the listener in the theater."

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The adventurous Santa Fe Opera is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a season that includes such rarities as Paul Hindemith's News of the Day, Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Richard Strauss's Daphne. But, a few individual performances aside, it has been a dry operatic summer in the Southwest.

Surprisingly, the most successful production was the Hindemith. News of the Day is a Brechtian satire from the '20s about an ordinary couple (Soprano Mary Shearer and Baritone William Workman) whose divorce makes worldwide headlines. It's not half the opera that Hindemith's great Mathis der Maler--a work that really deserves revival--is, but Lou Galterio's madcap staging made it lively and Bruce Ferden's energetic conducting kept the evening humming. No amount of stage magic by Director Bliss Hebert, however, could save The Rake's Progress, the most depressing waste of a good libretto (by W.H. Auden and Chester Kailman) in 20th century opera. Neither Soprano Elizabeth Hynes' touching Anne Trulove nor Raymond Leppard's sympathetic work with the orchestra could raise the music above Stravinsky's cynically pedestrian level. Strauss's Daphne, written when the composer was 72, is a tired piece, with only one touch of genius: the wizardry of the instrumental passage depicting the mythic heroine as she turns into a laurel tree. As Daphne, Soprano Roberta Alexander sang with an unusually pure lyric voice. But it's a long wait for the laurels--which will never be awarded to Daphne anyway. --By Michael Walsh

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