February’s classical music scene has been enlivened by a month-long celebration of the 80th birthday of John Harbison, the acclaimed American composer. He and his wife, Rose Mary, have strong local ties; they host the annual Token Creek Festival each August.
On Feb. 15-17, the Madison Symphony Orchestra included one of his large orchestral works in its program. And on the evening of Feb. 17, the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music gave a concert of chamber music in his honor.
The opener on Feb. 17 was a work of Haydn, a composer Harbison greatly admires. It was the Quartet in B-flat, Op. 76, No. 4, known as the “Sunrise.” It exemplifies the culmination of Haydn’s perfection of the form he had helped create. And it was played beautifully by the Pro Arte Quartet.
The rest of the program was pure Harbison.
Most contemporary composers have long forsworn traditional forms and organizational ideas. Harbison enjoys thinking in epigrammatic fashion, proposing bits of germinal ideas which he may or not pursue at length. He also likes clever titles, which may or not illuminate his purposes. Such were the characteristics of all the chamber pieces presented in this concert.
Two sets were written for single instruments. Subtitled “Codas for Solo Piano,” its witty title is “A Bag of Tails.” Catch the pun? Each of the seven pieces is dedicated to a pianist Harbison admires. They were played forthrightly by Timothy Lovelace.
Harbison himself is a trained violist, and composed a collection of six pieces called “The Violist’s Notebooks,” each dedicated to a performer he appreciates, including UW’s Sally Chisholm, the Pro Arte Quartet’s violist. It’s too rare that audiences get to hear Chisholm’s beautifully burnished sound on its own, so that alone was a great treat.
Rick Langer
Harbison composed “Four Encores for Stan” as a tribute to conductor (and composer) Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and nuggets of his published thoughts inspired each of Harbison’s four movements. The music, demonstrating a solid knowledge of quartet textures, was played by the Pro Arte Quartet, each movement preceded by the conductor’s short passages, read by Buzz Kemper.
And finally, the piéce de resistance, the world premiere of the Viola Sonata, cast in six movements of diminishing length. It was written for Sally Chisholm, who played it robustly with pianist Lovelace.
All in all, it was distinctive program, honoring a notable composer—who was there to take his bows.
