Digestible Tunes from Barbara Harbach

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

This Friday MSR Classics will release the thirteenth album in its Music of Barbara Harbach series. MSR clearly has a lot riding on her. This is the fifth album of her orchestra music, presenting four compositions all written in 2017. To date there have also be five albums of chamber music, along with single albums of music for string ensemble, organ music, and vocal music. There are also seven albums of her performing on harpsichord or organ, included a fourteen-CD box of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. As might be expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new album.

There is no shortage of vigorous energy in Harbach’s compositions. She clearly knows how to seek out inventions based on previously-composed music, which is essentially the strategy behind the five-movement Suite Luther, written to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg in 1517. However, over the course of the entire album there is a sense that Harbach always gets off to a good start but has little to add as she goes along her way.

Her catalog includes choral anthems and scores for both musicals and films, where texts and narrative themes can orient the journey behind the music. However, in the absence of such a framework (as is the case in Suite Luther), there is a prevailing problem of repeating too few motifs too many times. Instrumental coloration can distract from such repetitions, but it can only go so far.

I would have thought that a keyboardist that had committed herself to the almost intimidating number of innovative sonatas by Soler might have provided herself with a knapsack for invention in her own compositions, but this new album offers few signs of this being the case.