Boston & New York: Harbison, Wuorinen, Ueno and Sanford

Extract

The last two of the works commissioned by the Boston Symphony to celebrate the first season of James Levine as its Music Director were unveiled by Levine and the orchestra in Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York in April. John Harbison, whose The Great Gatsby was written for Levine and the Metropolitan Opera, had been working on an opera based on Lolita by Nabokov. He eventually decided that the problems presented by the staging of the work were insurmountable, and has, at least for the moment, abandoned the project, which he now considers misguided. He made the same decision in regard to the Fitzgerald novel about ten years before actually completing that project, so in the future this opera may also eventually see the light of day. Meanwhile, just as Harbison's aborted first attempt at Gatsby produced his ‘fox-trot for orchestra’, Remembering Gatsby, the work at Lolita has resulted in his most recent work for the BSO, a seven-minute overture based on material intended for the opera, entitled Darkbloom. Harbison's program note for the work does not name either Lolita or Nabokov, but speaks only of ‘a famous and infamous American novel’ in which Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) ‘is a just a secondary character’. Harbison chose Darkbloom as a title for the work ‘because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture’, and ‘serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragic-comic spirit of the story and its author’. Darkbloom itself is attractive and skilfully wrought. A balletic section which portrays two young women playing tennis is the most memorable music in the work.