As the festival's director (his fourth turn since 1992), Harbison focused each concert on a different aspect of music, balancing styles and instruments and encouraging compositions with roots in improvised performance and jazz. Observers of past festivals said they hadn't heard programs so obligingly brief, and so pervasively tonal. "It used to be as thorny and academic as you could take," said a Boston physician and regular. "This has been so lyrical."
These composers have had a winding journey. They had to pick their way through the battle camps of Stravinsky Neoclassicism vs. Schoenbergian Serialism, some leaning one way, some the other. They loved jazz and show music, which promised an American way forward, and later embraced synthesizers and tape. But amid the roar of rock 'n' roll and the mass marketing of pop stars, the makers of concert music retreated into academe, and to mini-festivals like this one. "The Generation of '38" had little choice to be eclectic and experimental. The question is, What else would they be?
Just how eclectic was obvious in Sunday night's concert at Ozawa Hall, when David Borden's soothing electronic fusion of jazz piano and synthesizer ("Earth Journeys") was followed by John Heiss's hushed and tonal "Five Songs From James Joyce" for soprano, clarinet, and piano; Theodore Antoniou's "Lament for Manos," a haunting essay in the softest register for the clarinet; and the screaming atonality of del Tredici's "I Hear an Army," for string quartet and soprano. "Army" had been premiered at Tanglewood in 1964, a relic of revolution. But this was not a retrospective. Most of the music was recent, and Charles Fussell's set of cool, elegant songs for baritone, "Venture," was being heard in public for the first time. Wilson's 1976 "Sometimes," a long scene for a miked solo voice with an electronic backdrop that deconstructs the spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," closed the evening.
