John HARBISON (b. 1938)
Diotima (1976) [20:00]
Milosz Songs for Soprano and Orchestra (2006) [27:10]
Symphony No.6 (2011) [26:08]
Dawn Upshaw (soprano) Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose
Rec. 29 October 2017 (Diotima) and 7 April 2019 (Milosz, Symphony) at Jordan Hall, Boston, USA
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
BMOP/SOUND 1083 SACD [75:22]
This new release represents the latest fruits of a long and happy relationship between the protean Boston Modern Orchestra Project under their indefatigable conductor Gil Rose and the American composer, John Harbison. As the composer points out in his brief introductory note the piece Diotima and the 6th Symphony represent “my first and likely my last music for orchestra”. With song settings of poems by Milosz sandwiched between them, this disc provides a good prospectus of the career of this fine composer. Harbison should probably be placed at the more conservative end of the contemporary scene and, to my ear at least, he seems to grow naturally out of the work of compatriots such as Ives, Copland and Harris.
Diotima, written in 1976, was Harbison’s breakthrough piece and a bit of distance in time enables us to hear it as an excellent piece of writing and not just a work of promise. The inspiration is not the character who features in Plato’s writings about Socrates but the life and work of the German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. The Diotima who features in his writings was his name for the object of his unrequited love, Susette Gontard. Frustrated passion, the disintegration of his mental health and a nostalgia for the classical world all leave their mark on Hölderlin’s later poetry and it is this heady combination of elements that Harbison’s piece seeks to bring to musical life. There is plenty of longing in the slowly winding, agonised string melodies that go on, in his later works, to become one of Harbison’s musical fingerprints. As these melodies slowly unfold the tension in the music increases and the music begins to fracture. The music becomes more mobile, dissonant and disrupted. All the time, Harbison holds to traditional musical values and the forces of chaos are kept at bay by this musical classicism, just as Hölderlin’s adherence to the values of Greece and Rome held his poetry together even as his mind gave way. It is only right at the very end that the frenzy engulfs the music and the piece ends.
The booklet notes included do not list this as a premiere recording unlike the Milosz songs but I have been unable to track down any previous recording. No matter. This is as good a recording as anyone could want. I want to give special praise to the producer and the recording engineer as the sound is quite glorious. Clear and detailed without becoming excessively forensic and with the warmth this post Romantic music needs.
The Milosz songs date from 2006 and seem to me to reflect rather well the character of the Polish poet’s work. This is music full of playfulness and wonder set against a backdrop of the darker realities of the world Milosz came from, behind the Iron Curtain.
As a cycle, I found it a little uneven. Sometimes the rather prosaic sits alongside the genuinely inspired. For example, the longest song, ‘On Old Women’ remains stubbornly disengaged until the last couplet:
‘May the day of your death not be a day of hopelessness, but of trust in the light that shines through earthly forms’.
Harbison provides these lines with very spare music high up on the flute but it really does conjure up ‘the light that shines through earthly forms’. This passage ushers in the restrained, enchanted world of the last two songs. The penultimate song, ‘Epilogue’, drifts on a harmonic haze like early morning mists while the incantatory bells of ‘Rays of Dazzling Light’ find music as transformative as Milosz’s verse in search of healing the pain of the human condition.
The biggest issue I have with this release is probably its starriest name, Dawn Upshaw. I should be grateful for her tireless commitment to new music but I find her characterisation a little bland in response to such wry music to such wry words. It could be argued that Upshaw’s wide-eyed innocent is ideal for the many moments of wonder but such moments aren’t the whole picture. I was left feeling that this interpretation is more of a place holder than a definitive account.
The mood of quiet reflection with which the Milosz songs conclude provides the perfect introduction to the most recent of Harbison’s symphonies, premiered in 2011. If those songs are preoccupied by what lies beyond the material, this symphony, “likely my last” remember, seems dominated by moving toward the end of life.
The entire symphony seems to revolve around the poem ‘Entering the Temple in Nimes’ by James Wright, a setting of which forms the first movement. The later movements use material from this setting and the mood of it pervades the whole. The poem is suffused with longing to visit the temple of Diana in Nimes in France and regret that the poet remains stuck with wintry rain preventing him from visiting the temple. In the poem, the poet remains trapped but the symphony seems an attempt to use the creative imagination to overcome what cannot be achieved in the flesh. It attempts to do what the poet says he can’t do. This seems to me a metaphor for the composer’s creative response to the limitations of old age. The symphony never really resolves whether the composer succeeds or not. Certainly, it never resolves it into the resigned defeated mood at the end of the poem. Its mood is necessarily ambivalent and the finale ends with an oblique question rather a grand summation. I was reminded of Vaughan Williams’ solution to the end of his last symphony, similarly written in old age. Harbison’s is a gentler score and painted in washes of watercolours where VW is in vivid daubs of oil paint. Harbison’s score, like Wright’s poem, is shot through with both the sting of regret and a vivid Mediterranean light. The whole work is a shimmering ode to the transformative potential of the art of music and perhaps a leave taking of sorts from that art. I say perhaps because that quizzical ending leaves the door open.
As for musical matters, the setting of the poem is almost casually plain. The second movement, the darkest of the four, is built up from Harbison’s characteristic intertwining, knotty long string melodies. Both mood and musical material are derived from the passage in the opening movement which sets the words ‘I pray for the stone-eyed legions of the rain/ To put off their armor’. The third threatens to be a rumbunctious scherzo but more ethereal music keeps breaking through like the sunlight of the South of France. The finale pulls all these elements together and represents a flowering, particularly, of the musical elements of the opening movement. As it progresses, it seems to move away from the dark music of the rain mentioned in the poem and into the sunlit temple before vanishing in the quixotic ending I have already mentioned. The music is muted, its dissonances gentle ones, the scoring conventional but diaphanous.
This is the second recording of this symphony. It was taped previously by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman on a 2013 release from the orchestra’s own label. Both releases have much to recommend them. Zinman’s seems sharper on detail where I think Rose is better at catching that elusive sunlit quality I have mentioned several times that seems to me essential to the spirit of the piece. At heart, this is a gentle piece and I think this new recording understands that better. The BMOP give nothing away to their more famous Boston rivals and I preferred their recorded sound.
This is a distinguished addition to the Harbison discography and, in the case of the 6th symphony, one that improves on what went before. Harbison’s is an engaging musical personality and those interested in an imaginative approach to more conventional musical language should seek him out. What they will find is music of immense skill and beauty that touches, at its best, on deeper matters.
David McDade
