HARBISON: Ulysses.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose.
BMOPSound 1001 (M) (DDD) TT: 80:32 BUY NOW FROM AMAZON
A Neo-Romantic smash. John Harbison has always commanded the respect
of his fellow composers, although the public at large, I think, has
yet to
tumble to him. He has written music in every genre, including a few operas,
concerti, sonatas, religious choral works, oratorio, and string quartets.
He studied with Piston, Sessions, Kim, Blacher, and Dallapiccola, among
others, and ended up going his own way. He has received the MacArthur "genius" award.
For many years, he has served on the board of Emmanuel Church in Boston,
where they do a Bach cantata every week with full forces and at the highest
professional level. I first encountered his music in the Seventies, having
read a rave review by the New Yorker's Andrew Porter.
Harbison himself claims the influence not only of Bach and Stravinsky,
but also of jazz. As a teen, he led a group. Many currents feed his music,
and not just the ones you'd think of right away. As I say, he remains
true to himself without feeling the need to adapt to this or that "new
thing." His music always impresses me with its directness -- the feeling
that he has said exactly what's on his mind, without fuzz or static.
Considering Harbison's credentials and career, you would expect a different
fate for his two-act, full-length ballet Ulysses. He wrote it twenty-five
years ago, without receiving a commission first and trusting that eventually
somebody would take it up. Inspired by a television broadcast of Monteverdi's
Il Ritorno d' Ulisse in Patria, particularly the climactic scene where
Odysseus slays the suitors, Harbison steeped himself in Homer's poem
and the major works it inspired. He gathered material for years. Nevertheless,
to date, no ballet company has performed it. The separate acts -- "Ulysses'
Raft" and "Ulysses' Bow" -- have been played by orchestras,
and "Bow" received a recording led by Previn. Yet this is the
first recording of the entire ballet, which again points to the unhealthy
state of music in my own country. As far as I'm concerned, the ballet takes
its place with the other outstanding modern musical treatments of the theme:
Dallapiccola's opera Ulisse and Nicholas Maw's super-symphonic Odyssey,
neither of which most classical-music listeners will have heard.
Ulysses is a story-ballet, and the story is, of course, that of Homer's
Odyssey. It's too much to ask for everything in all twenty-four books
of the poem, and Harbison does a spectacular job fashioning something
workable
which retains the essentials. Unlike Dallapiccola's Ulisse and Maw's
Odyssey, the music doesn't meditate on the philosophic implications of
journey.
Harbison has specifically located his inspiration in the physical: the
image of the bow drawn and fired again and again, the killing of the
suitors in a confined space with no escape. The music owes an obvious
debt to the
early Stravinsky ballets, particularly Le Sacre du printemps, in that
it's music for both the "eye" and the body. Over and over, it evokes
pictures and actions, from the prelude to Act I where your mind "sees" the
lapping of the waves against Ulysses's boat, to the cyclops Polyphemus's
rage, to the climactic scene. Actually, the music reminded me most of Samuel
Barber's ballet for Martha Graham, Medea (Cave of the Heart), but that
too shows the influence of the Stravinsky ballets.
Harbison has written that he wanted to avoid the psychological in this
ballet. Ulysses is a man to whom things happen but who reacts to them
rather than reflects upon them. The music creates a brutal, yet truly
classical
atmosphere. It looks out, rather than inward, and powerfully at that.
We are used to a sanitized classicism -- just think of the centaurs,
centaurettes,
and punk mini-satyrs in Disney's Fantasia or the "monumental" classicism
of Claude of Lorraine or even of some of Picasso. The Greek stories themselves
are fairly savage and terrifying. The Homer epics brim full of blood, mutilation,
hackings, excrement, even cannibalism, as well as (I admit) some of the
most radiant nature-writing in Western civilization. Although Harbison
emphasizes the first, he doesn't slight the second, especially in the Nausicaa
scene, perhaps my favorite book of the entire Odyssey. Harbison gives us
here a mini-suite of dances -- from the ball-tossing of the princess and
her girl-friends to the "ritual dances" of the court as they
welcome the disguised Ulysses as their guest.
Harbison writes about the difference between ballet and symphony, especially
about the different nature of the musical demands for both. The symphony
needs "open-ended" ideas which lend themselves to development,
while the ballet needs ideas which satisfy the listener with merely their
statement (this is surely influenced by the limits of a dancer's stamina).
For all of that, however, the musical structure of the ballet hangs together.
Motives -- like the ones for Ulysses's wanderings, for Penelope, and for
Ulysses's bow -- pop up in more than one section, and there's a similarity
of tone (although musical variety) for most sections. Harbison refers to
a "quasi-Wagnerian" assignment of Leitmotiven to various characters
and plot elements. Surely, most of them have gone by me during my first
acquaintance with the score, but what I have picked up on has enhanced
the pleasure of the work. Also, Harbison uses inventive orchestration dramatically
-- tubas depict Polyphemus, the ondes martinot Circe, yelping trumpets
Charybdis, for example. Furthermore, several sections run together to produce
a long, quasi-symphonic span, especially true of the second act, where
everything seems to rush to the ballet's climax. This score will keep me
occupied for a long time.
Gil Rose and the Boston Music Orchestral Project do a fabulous job, with
first-rate playing and a wonderful pace. The ballet runs close to an
hour-and-a-half, and yet it never bores you, due, I think, not only to
Harbison but to Rose.
The sound is fine.
S.G.S. (June 2008)
|