HARBISON: Piano Trios / Gatsby Etudes / The Violist's Notebo

Born in 1938 into a musical family, John Harbison studied at Harvard, and with Roger Sessions at Princeton. He is one of America’s most accomplished musicians, with four symphonies, three operas and a Pulitzer Prize-winning cantata to his credit. Of his Piano Trio No. 2, Harbison writes: ‘[It] makes little contact with the Mozart-to-Shostakovich central trio repertoire, and a great deal with the transparency, ambiguity, and shiftiness of Papa Joseph Haydn’. The Gatsby Etudes, ‘pianistically challenging and fun to play’, were written while Harbison was preparing the opera The Great Gatsby for production by the Metropolitan Opera. The Violist’s Notebooks were inspired by Bartolomeo Campagnoli’s (1751-1827) Caprices for viola, Harbison’s own instrument. Other works on this disc include an earlier piano trio and a cello suite, which the composer describes as ‘baroque in origins, more private, and very compact’.