Wilson: Sinfonia/Harbison: Symphony No. 1

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa John Harbison's music draws together gestures and ideas from musical worlds that reflect such favorite composers as Robert Schumann and Heinrich Schutz, the songs of George Gershwin, and the hieratic qualities of Igor Stravinsky. His work has always been expressive, though never with a heart-on-sleeve emoting of personal angst, a mode that simply does not interest him. Recently Harbison has shown an interest in recapturing such historical genres as the formal set of variations (as in his Variations for violin, clarinet, and piano) or the piano quintet. The Symphony No. 1 comes naturally in this progression, being cast in four discrete movements following a two-hundred-year tradition of symphonic writing rather than the symphony in one-movement form that is quite frequently encountered these days. Although he makes use of avant-garde techniques, Olly Wilson is not a doctrinaire composer. Wilson has noted that the first movement of Sinfonia evolves