Word: harbison
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...John Harbison rediscovers the appeal of the human voice
...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...
...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...
...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...
...more expressive was John Harbison's Samuel Chapter (1978), for soprano and small ensemble. Composer Harbison presents an episode from the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel in a deliberately archaic way, lending his work an austere, ceremonial quality that suits the text well...