The final work that I’m performing at the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival is John Harbison’s Piano Quintet, written in 1981 for Georgia O’Keefe and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. John Rockwell, then music critic for the New York Times, wrote this in his review of the premiere performance in Santa Fe:
The Quintet is dedicated to Georgia O’Keeffe, and what is most impressive about it is its suggestions of space. Mr. Harbison doesn’t feel the need to keep everybody busy all the time. There is an openness to the chordal spacing, to the textural delineation, and even to the rhythms, in their measured regularity. And the many points of rest, culminating in the lyric Elegia at the end, lend the piece a moving undercurrent of seriousness : Mr. Harbison suffered losses in his family recently, and alludes in his program notes to ”the difficu lt circumstances under which the piece was composed.”
All in all, it gave hope that this demonstrably gifted musician may be on his way to finding his own compositional voice. The fine performers were Edward Auer, piano, and a string quartet of Daniel Phillips, Ani Kavafian, Walter Trampler and Timothy Eddy.
It’s a welcome addition to the repertoire, providing an alternative to the Big Three (Brahms, Dvorak, and Schumann), yet more audience accessible than later quintets by Wolfgang Rihm and Thomas Adés.
Here’s a performance of the first movement, Overture, by the Charis Piano Quintet: