**** Lorraine Hunt, Dawn Upshaw, Peggy Pearson, Jo-Ann Sternberg, Scott Yoo, Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, Greenleaf Chamber Players, John Harbison

AT FIRST LIGHT

(Archetype)

As John Harbison, Boston's most distinguished "younger" composer, approaches 60 (December 20), I can't imagine a better birthday present than this new recording. First there's the extraordinary Lorraine Hunt singing a work she premiered in 1989, the chamber version of books three and four of Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale's darkly cryptic and radiantly nostalgic Mottetti. The entire four-book, 20-poem cycle takes nearly an hour, and it remains one of Harbison's masterpieces of melody, color, invention, and poignant inwardness. These gorgeously orchestrated sections may be less exciting than the original piano version; still, a rocking gondola, or a quotation from the "Bell Song" from Lakmé, aching memories of Montale's lost love, are seductively evoked. Hunt's golden voice embraces, teases, lingers over, or flings out every syllable. So do the Greenleaf Chamber Players, with Harbison's favorite oboist, Peggy Pearson, at the center.

Pearson returns with Scott Yoo and Metamorphosen in three more pieces. Snow Country, a "winter pastorale" (1979), takes off from where Schubert's Unfinished Symphony begins. Harbison gives her one of the great long-breathed melodies in contemporary music. She joins Dawn Upshaw in Chorale Cantata (1994), which alternates a chorale by Martin Luther with two brief, beautifully bleak poems by Michael Fried; then she and clarinettist Jo-Ann Sternberg are the volatile protagonists in the comic and touching Concerto for Oboe and Clarinet (1984), which "one astute writer," Harbison notes, called "scenes from a marriage." These performances are all, of course, both blissfully brilliant and uniquely authoritative.

-- Lloyd Schwartz