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Tales of brave Ulysses
John Harbison’s 20-year-old score finally gets a hearing
BY DAVID WEININGER

Composer John Harbison is used to cutting against the grain of the times. At a time when many composers are opting for a simplified, neo-Romantic musical language, he writes large-scale works featuring both intricate melody and complex musical grammar. His Requiem (premiered by the BSO last season) eschews the modern tendency to interpolate contemporary texts into the standard Requiem sequence, devoting itself instead to a forceful elucidation of the Latin text.

He was also out of step with the times 20 years ago, when he wrote his first ballet score, Ulysses. He thought, quite sensibly, that an adaptation of the Odyssey would make for a vivid dance program. "I didn’t understand at the time how out of fashion full-length ballets were," he says at his office at MIT, where he teaches music. "What I knew about that world — I knew the Stravinsky pieces, and the Prokofiev [Romeo and Juliet], which was probably the last full-length ballet that actually established itself."

Neither could he get an orchestra to offer the full score in concert. So Harbison began to section out portions of Ulysses to various groups. "It’s a piece that five or six orchestras have done parts of. Really, it was just the way I could get to hear it, I kept parceling it out. So I don’t have a really good idea of what this piece is like — what it’s like to hear it all the way through." That will change next Friday when the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, under the direction of Gil Rose, presents the first complete performance of the score.

The piece is made up of two acts, "Ulysses’ Raft" and "Ulysses’ Bow." In preparing for the performance, Harbison made some revisions to the 20-year old piece, pruning the first and fifth scenes of the first act. "They were the first scenes that I wrote, and I felt like they had too many actions, which meant that the music had too many sections. You have to scale a [dance] piece in a different way, and you tend to make shorter scenes because of the physical requirement. And those two scenes I felt had too many story events, which resulted in the music being over-sectioned. So what I did was to study those scenes and try to get a trimmer dramatic continuity."

"Ulysses’ Bow," he felt, needed less reworking, since it "has only one really crucial action," where Ulysses strings his bow, succeeding where the suitors have failed and reclaiming his throne and Penelope. This was the scene that had inspired Harbison to compose the work in the first place. In a program note for BMOP, he describes seeing Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, where that scene struck him as "the most visually compelling theatrical scene I had ever witnessed." From the start, this was to be the real climax of the piece. "Once he’s back in Ithaca, the whole idea is maneuvers to make ready the recapture of his kingdom and his wife."

After completing Ulysses, Harbison learned that while he had been working on it, the British composer Nicholas Maw had been writing Odyssey, an unbroken 95-minute orchestral piece that, unlike Harbison’s work, functions as a kind of philosophical commentary on the text. Maw too had trouble getting his work heard (most likely because the original commission was for a 25-minute score). Where Harbison shows the text through a series of character- and action-based motifs, Maw’s piece revels in "very large, long melodies. It’s a marvelous piece. I think it’s amazing how completely different it is in that he doesn’t seem attached to the scenes themselves but to a sort of philosophy or metaphor of a journey."

Whether Harbison’s Ulysses will ever be presented as a fully choreographed work is yet to be decided. As he says in the program note, "The theatrical viability of the piece is still an open question that I hope the musical representation will pose."

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will perform Ulysses next Friday, October 3, at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street. Tickets are $19 to $38; call (617) 363-0396.

ALSO OPENING its season next week is the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink. The Gala Opening Night program will comprise Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia, with pianist Dubravka Tomsic and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and his Fifth Symphony. That’s next Thursday, October 2, at 6:30 p.m., and tickets are $75 to $150. The two concerts that follow, October 3 at 1:30 p.m. and October 4 at 8 p.m., will add the Consecration of the House Overture and the cantata Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. Tickets for those are $26 to $86. Symphony Hall is at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston; call (617) 266-1200.


Issue Date: September 26 - October 2, 2003
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