In celebration of John Harbison’s 80th-birthday year, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players offered a half-century spectrum of his chamber music at Jordan Hall on Sunday, topping off the afternoon with a Bach cantata in honor of Harbison’s lifelong dedication to that repertory.
Harbison’s Duo for flute and piano, in five movements, represented the earliest phase of his maturity. Composed in 1961, it demonstrated his characteristic paratonal harmony — well-established signposts of strong tonality blurred with chromaticism that sometimes becomes dense but only seldom atonally predominant. One could hear some echoes of the smooth linear counterpoint of Walter Piston — Harbison’s then-most-recent teacher — with equal-length phrases and long lines. Continue Reading
