Word: mottetti
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...Full Moon in March. The past 15 months brought two major premieres: the Violin Concerto, which he wrote for his violinist wife Rose Mary, and the Piano Concerto, which won the Kennedy Center prize. Earlier this month in Santa Fe, two new Harbison works got their first performances. Mottetti di Montale is a darkly elegiac, 50-minute song cycle based on po ems by Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Piano Quintet is a spare and acerbic five-movement work commissioned by the festival and dedicated to Artist Georgia O'Keeffe...
...Mottetti, stylishly performed by Mezzo-Soprano Janice Felty and Pianist Edward Auer, recalls the late Ital ian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in its lyricism and sophisticated melodic charm. Harbison sets dark, vivid images from Montale's Le Occasioni (1939) allusively, often employing the familiar device of musical tone painting. In the ninth poem, for example, the mezzo sings of a darting green lizard, and the piano responds with a scaly slither. But the music is much more than a literal transcription of the poetry, for Harbison has given it a deeper layer of meaning in transforming it into song...