Fairly or not, John Harbison's music is sometimes hard for listeners to embrace, not only because of its unpredictable variety and emotional aloofness, but also because of its strong literary orientation, which adds yet another level of complexity to an already difficult body of work. Mottetti di Montale is a collection of art songs in four books on texts by Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), drawn from his collection "Le Occasioni." One may expect that Harbison's love for these poems and feeling for the Italian ...
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Fairly or not, John Harbison's music is sometimes hard for listeners to embrace, not only because of its unpredictable variety and emotional aloofness, but also because of its strong literary orientation, which adds yet another level of complexity to an already difficult body of work. Mottetti di Montale is a collection of art songs in four books on texts by Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), drawn from his collection "Le Occasioni." One may expect that Harbison's love for these poems and feeling for the Italian language are sufficient to inspire great music, but that is regrettably not the case: despite his apparent skill in setting the poems for voice, the work as a whole is an indifferent mélange of styles, here and there evoking the nervous expressionism of the second Viennese school, but most often muddling through a less interesting mixture of soft-edged modernism, free-floating neo-Romantic tonality, winking allusions to popular music, and the loose gestures of the late avant-garde....
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