Word: harbison
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...that role, she gets honest feedback on her clothes: "You know instantaneously if you're right on target or if you're not with what people need and want." Kamali believes she has heard the message: she's going to keep on sweating. -By Georgia Harbison...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...