Ionarts at Large: BSO Tackles Difficult Work at Tanglewood

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero leads the BSO and pianist Ingrid Fliter (photo by Hilary Scott)
It was reasonable to leave the Friday evening concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in a relaxed mood. A cool breeze blanketed the Koussevitzky Music Shed as the orchestra finished a symphony-free program with soft, melodic works: Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the Blumine movement from Mahler's third first symphony, and Brahms’ Second Serenade in A. Nashville Symphony Orchestra Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero led both works ably, with strong control over sound and phrasing. Skip ahead 24 hours to Saturday night and anyone still feeling the calming effects of those works was shaken out of their relaxed state by the pounding E minor chords for percussion and brass of John Adams’s massive Harmonielehre.

Guerrero again was leading the Boston players, providing relative consistency after five weekends of guest conductors as well as one weekend where Music Director Andris Nelsons was on the podium. With a schedule at Tanglewood that asks the orchestra to mount three different programs each weekend with minimal rehearsal, programming Harmonielehre was somewhat risky. Mixing elements of minimalism — pulsating rhythms, repetition and quicksilver ornamentation — with more traditional harmonies, the dense, three-part work is loaded with constant movement and is a heavy lift on few rehearsals. Perhaps this explains why it was the orchestra’s first performance of what has become one of the most successful post-WWII compositions.

Fortunately the BSO had several factors in its favor. A technically sound conductor with a clear beat, Guerrero is very comfortable with contemporary music. Second was the orchestra’s world-class skill and musicianship. The combination yielded an accurate first performance, although one that seemed to sacrifice speed and interpretation for safety, particularly in the first movement, whose lack of energy negated many of Adams’s musical effects.

The slower Part II, “The Anfortas Wound,” named for the legendary Fisher King, yielded a far better result. The somber movement’s second climax, quoting the screaming chords of the Adagio of Mahler’s tenth symphony, was appropriately vexing. Ditto an extended piccolo trumpet solo, performed with a gorgeous, otherworldly sound by Thomas Rolfs. The contrasting third part, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,” emanates from a dream Adams had of the German theologian (1260-1328) flying with Adams’ daughter, Emily, on his shoulders. Accordingly it’s a swirling, uplifting movement. Toward the end of it, Guerrero increased the tempo and energy level, leading to a triumphant conclusion on an E-flat major chord.

Other Reviews: Ken Ross, Soloist-turned-conductor impresses with NSO’s Mahler (Mass Live, August 7)

The Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter had the unenviable task of being a late replacement for Daniil Trifonov, one of classical music’s current “It” pianists, whose ear malady prevented him from traveling. A Chopin specialist, Fliter was more than up to the task of dispatching Chopin’s second piano concerto. Her light touch and fine technique were well suited to this composition, completed when Chopin was just 20. It made one wonder how a more demonstrative player, like Trifonov, would have handled the concerto. Again for Guerrero and the BSO, though, it was more a matter of keeping soloist and orchestra together throughout the piece than making bold interpretive statements. Fliter cooperated, keeping tempi steady and eschewing rubato, allowing the music, rather than her technical prowess, to take the lead. To his credit, Guerrero proved a sensitive collaborator, following Fliter expertly. As was the case in the Adams, Guerrero was most effective in the middle slow movement, said to be a paean to Chopin’s boyhood amours, as he correctly highlighted the interplay between Fliter and bassoonist Richard Svoboda.

Guerrero’s comfort with slow movements gave your reviewer concern about the final work, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks of Richard Strauss. There was little need to worry. The orchestra bounded through the Strauss, a Boston Symphony staple, alternating between loud and soft passages, climaxing with a raucous gallows scene. Hornist James Sommerville handled the solo horn parts with style and William R. Hudgins was appropriately irreverent on clarinet. Indeed Guerrero proved adept in both quiet moments and boisterous ones.

On Forbes: The Met's Klinghoffer Brouhaha

“The verdict was in, right after the premiere: The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’ opera that was performed at the MET to vociferous and heated, if small, protests (amply supplemented by local politicians) on October 20, is not an anti-semitic work.

Not a particularly surprising verdict, actually—that much was known already and we needn’t feign surprise now. This alleged anti-semitism had been a non-issue when it was first performed in Brussels (in 1991). Nor had it been an issue on the subsequent performances in New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music, also 1991), or Philadelphia (Curtis, 2005), or this very production’s earlier performance in London (English National Opera, early 2012). The only story in the Klinghoffer-controversy is that it became a story at all...

Continue reading here, at Forbes.com

Dip Your Ears, No. 181 (Doctor Atomic, Listener’s Digest)

John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony, Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine P.Oundjian / Royal Scottish NO Chandos SACD

Scotch Doktarr Atommac

John Adams’ single movement tripartite Doctor Atomic Symphony is a splendid primer (even time-saving substitute) for his opera on the J. Robert Oppenheimer subject. From the opening shot of “The Laboratory”, the expansive central “Panic”, and the closing meditation “Trinity”, Adams takes the listener through a wild then subdued, brooding, organic, very much tonal and always loud work that owes to Varèse, occasionally reminds of Bruckner, and radiates original Adams. It is coupled with the classic quasi-Symphony of Adams’, Harmonielehre which is to Adams what Mathis der Maler is to Hindemith. Short Ride in a Fast Machine is exactly what the title says; a wild 4-minute romp that is among Adams’ most easily enjoyable orchestral amuse-bouches. 

Charles’ review of the whole shebang on DVD here.

Final Word on 'Death of Klinghoffer'

Death of Klinghoffer, Metropolitan Opera (photo by Ken Howard)
The reviews are in for the Metropolitan Opera's production of The Death of Klinghoffer, which opened on Monday night. The commentary (not to say, the reviews), polarized in an unappetizing political way, has been difficult to read. The excesses of both sides are absurd: "Putting on this opera is equivalent to a second Holocaust!" just as much as "No one has any right to criticize this opera for romanticizing terrorists!" Of course, John Adams, Alice Goodman, and the Metropolitan Opera have the right to produce the work -- we live in a free society. Just as obviously, Leon Klinghoffer's daughters are understandably dismayed at the way their father's murder was connected to the political grievances of his murderers.

As I wrote this past summer, if the story were rooted in another conflict but in everything else parallel, the reaction would have been different. Imagine an opera about the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria that opens with a chorus laying out the political and religious grievances of the Boko Haram militants, calling for the establishment of Sharia law. Imagine an opera about the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl that opens with a chorus describing the causes behind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's hatred of the United States. Imagine an opera about the murder of Matthew Shepard that opens with a chorus about the need to defend the American family from homosexuality. If any of those imagined operas were real, the family members of the victims would be upset -- and many other people would not only feel sympathy for those family members but also would feel outraged themselves.

"Terrorism is irrational," write Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer. "It should never be explained away or justified. Nor should the death of innocent civilians be misunderstood as an acceptable means for drawing attention to perceived political grievances. Unfortunately, The Death of Klinghoffer does all of this and sullies the memory of our father in the process."

The Reviews: New York Times | Washington Post | The New Yorker | Wall Street Journal | New York Observer | Bloomberg Financial Times | Los Angeles Times | Justin Davidson | David Patrick Stearns | Forbes | Martin Bernheimer (1992)

Another Ninth Symphony

T. F. Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premiers (including Beethoven's ninth symphony) (Yale UP, 2001)

Both of the pieces on this week's program from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, heard on Thursday night at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, are repetitions from recent seasons: John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, from 2006, and Beethoven's ninth symphony, more recently (and already planned again for next season). The combination of the two was also curious in that the events of the day commemorated by the Adams piece, September 11, 2001, seem to smash any and all hope one might have in the words of Schiller hammered on by Beethoven, "Alle Menschen werden Brüder." (The pairing was the same at the New York Philharmonic premiere of the Adams.) Worse than that, the length of the Adams made necessary some extremely fast tempi in the Beethoven, as if music director Marin Alsop was hellbent on hitting the target of a two-hour concert, as announced in the program. She almost made it by 10 pm, but at a cost.

My feelings about the Adams piece were not altered much by this performance, namely that it had its greatest power in the aftermath of the attacks, winning Adams a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, but as the years recede, its emotional power ebbs and weaknesses are revealed. I would love to hear the score without the recorded track, a recitation of victims' names and words spoken by their families, quoted in the New York Times. Most of the music is simple and repetitive in nature, soft chords that rise up and vanish through sections of the orchestra, and without those recorded voices it would be revealed as a vanilla accompaniment. Both the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and Peabody Children's Chorus made pleasing and well-articulated contributions to the atmospheric nature of the piece. It has one major emotional climax, as the chorus takes up the words of the wife of L. Russell Keene III, one of the victims -- "I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is" -- in a sort of gut-wrenching howl, with big sweeps of Sibelius-like sound in the orchestra. Little else leaves a lasting impression.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform 9/11 tribute paired with Beethoven (Washington Post, June 8) Tim Smith, Affecting pairing of Adams, Beethoven from the Baltimore Symphony (Baltimore Sun, June 7)

Beethoven's ninth symphony is performed so often that conductors look for something to make their interpretation stand out, and movement by movement Alsop's was marked by an almost anxious, frenetic quality. The first movement was rushed in a way that left little room for the "poco maestoso" part that Beethoven wanted to happen. In this attempt to wrench all the drama from the piece she could, most of the mystery of the movement, especially in the coda, was rushed over, with some sloppiness in the faster runs of the violins and winds. The scherzo was, appropriately, very fast and crisply articulated, but it felt more studious than playful, more furrowed brow than arched brow. Even beyond the sudden rests, the shift of time in the trio, and the surprise entrances of the timpani, it should have a playful side. The straightening out of the extreme rubato often applied to the third movement was much appreciated, but when you do not have to subdivide an Adagio molto, you are probably going too fast. The reason to make the trip to Baltimore was to hear a rather fine vocal quartet -- Angela Meade, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Dimitri Pittas, and Eric Owens (stepping in at the last minute to replace James Morris) -- but there was little to savor at the tempi imposed by Alsop. All of the musicians gave their best, but too much of this performance, from the first unsteady statement of the main theme by Owens, felt unsettled and rushed, even the final quartet moment, where Alsop could have luxuriated in Meade's voice soaring over our heads but did not.

This concert repeats tonight at Strathmore and tomorrow afternoon in Baltimore.

NSO New Moves

Some of the great scores of music history were made to accompany dancing. All too often, musicians and conductors play these without thinking about the choreography that went with them, something that has become evident to me in the last ten years, thanks to the chance to review a lot of ballet. Even so, when one cannot see these dances live -- some of these ballets are rarely mounted, after all -- there is the invaluable resource of Internet video, where many original choreographies, or reconstructions of them, can be viewed. The first thing that musicians and conductors, faced with one of these ballet scores, should do is to watch such videos, to get an idea of the movements that went with the music they are going to play. This is the strongest idea -- or it could have been -- behind the National Symphony Orchestra's New Moves series, a trilogy of concerts that may not have succeeded on all points but is ultimately the latest evidence of Christoph Eschenbach's willingness to embrace innovative programming.

The music selected for the first two of these concerts did not interest me all that much, but the third program, heard and seen last night, offered the strongest combination, still with some reservations. Sadly, scores that instantly come to my mind in this context, like Debussy's Jeux or Satie's Parade or Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat or Stravinsky's Pulcinella or Les noces, were not included. For the third concert, guest conductor Thomas Wilkins led two pieces that were rarely heard contemporary pieces not particularly associated with choreography. Michael Daugherty's Red Cape Tango, the conclusion of the Grammy-winning but not all that interesting Metropolis Symphony, has the rhythmic ostinato of the Habanera, complete with castanets, but is so repetitive that it grows tired about half-way through. Daugherty incorporated the first couple phrases of the Dies Irae, a long sequence whose later melodic material could have added some much-needed variety. The Sinfonia No. 4 ("Strands"), co-commissioned by the NSO from Washington-born composer George Walker, seemed even less about dance, a rather monochromatic wash of dissonant clusters that seemed to go nowhere, partly due to the pedestrian conducting of Wilkins, whose left hand generally did little other than mirror his baton hand, orderly but not revealing much else.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, Jessica Lang Dance, waltzing delightfully with Leila Josefowicz and the NSO (Washington Post, May 17) Anne Midgette, NSO’s ‘New Moves’ festival closes with Jessica Lang and Leila Josefowicz (Washington Post, May 17) ---, NSO New moves and UMd 'Appalachian Spring' join dance with orchestras (Washington Post, May 2) ---, NSO festival aims for fusion of symphony and dance at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, May 8) Robert Battey, National Symphony Orchestra's New Moves symphony + dance mini-festival (Washington Post, May 12)

The final piece on the first half, Copland's Appalachian Spring, was made for a choreography by Martha Graham. Seeing it danced live transformed the way that I hear that score, and anyone studying or playing it should watch it. The NSO played only the suite for full orchestra, which is another removal from the music's origins in dance, but even these selections are often boring without the story of the ballet and Graham's movements. The absence of dance was already felt in the first half, but it became glaring by comparison with the second half, for which the Jessica Lang Dance company gave the premiere of their director's new choreography, Scape, to the accompaniment of the violin concerto of John Adams. The soloist was Leila Josefowicz (pictured), who has performed the composer's work for electric violin, The Dharma at Big Sur, with both the NSO and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in recent years. Adams completed the violin concerto in 1995 1993, after which it was used for a choreography by New York City Ballet's Peter Martins. The music percolates with energy, with unusual sounds contributed by two synthesizers (whose players were seated near the conductor's podium) and a range of percussion instruments.

Lang's choreography went against the grain of the music for the most part, opening slowly with the nine dancers -- five women and four men, costumed in pajama-like outfits of soft colors, rarely featured in solos -- appearing in the chorister seats above the stage. In that location, movements were constrained, and almost no gestures seemed to have been inspired by the antic, creeping music, except when the soloist's cadenza corresponded with the disappearance of all but one of the group. As the dancers took the stage, extended out from where the orchestra sat by a platform bathed in icy blue-purple light, space-music sounds again seemed not to match with the clumping and spreading actions of the dancers, including some impressively long lifts. Only in the return of a more manic tempo in the third movement did the choreography seem related to the music, taking elements from various popular dances. Lang's style is abstract rather than narrative, recalling other choreographers' work without really adding up to its own character, but one might describe the story, if there had to be one, as the process of bodies being awakened by music, gradually taking on its pulses and gestures.

This concert repeats tonight, at 8 pm, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

John Adams' New Saxophone Concerto

Charles T. Downey, John Adams’ new concerto shows sax appeal in American premiere (The Classical Review, September 21)

By composing a saxophone concerto, John Adams has elevated the saxophone from its second-class status in the classical world. At least such were the hopes of some people, including perhaps the composer, for this new half-hour work. It is a heavy burden for a concerto, indeed just one of a growing number of concertos to feature the saxophone, to bear.

[Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
With Tim McAllister, saxophone
Adams, Saxophone Concerto (inter alia)

Some thoughts that did not make it into the review:

The saxophone has actually fared far better than other instruments invented in the 19th and 20th centuries: where are the concertos for the heckelphone, the sarrusophone, the Ondes Martenot, the electric guitar, the synthesizer, the Holztrompete? The saxophone seems to be doing just fine, and in any case, one new saxophone concerto is not going to cause saxophone parts to be added to all of those orchestral scores completed before the instrument’s invention in 1846 and its widespread acceptance. Because orchestras play so much music that predates or otherwise excludes the saxophone, it is naïve to expect that the instrument should be a part of every concert.

A live broadcast of the St. Louis Symphony's performance of the Saxophone Concerto will be available online on October 5, and Nonesuch will release a recording of the work in 2014.

SEE ALSO:
Tim Smith, BSO opens season with U.S. premiere of John Adams' Saxophone Concerto (Baltimore Sun, September 21)

William Robin, Classical Saxophone, an Outlier, Is Anointed by John Adams Concerto (New York Times, September 17)

Harriet Cunningham, Restless riffs and delicacy in Adams' saxophone concerto (Sydney Morning Herald, August 25)

Second Opinion: John Adams and his City Noir

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for this review from The Kennedy Center.

Last Thursday, American composer John Adams led the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in a program of Ottorino Resphigi’s Fountains of Rome, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, and Adams’s own City Noir, composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered in 2009. What could possibly tie this disparate package together in a thematic way? The program suggested a progression from an Italian version of French Impressionism, to French Impressionism with a healthy dollop of American jazz, and then to a form of American Impressionism suffused with jazz.

Read more »

John Adams Back with the NSO

J. Adams, City Noir (inter alia), Los Angeles Philharmonic, G. Dudamel (2009)

John Adams is coming to the end of his latest visit to Washington: after a four-day residency at the Library of Congress, he is taking the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra this week. As with previous guest stints in the area, with the NSO in 2010 and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, he paired one of his own pieces with music by other composers. The results fell out in similar ways last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, with the expertise of the composer conducting his own work being of interest but his limitations as a conductor leaving a mixed impression.

The highlight was the chance to hear Adams conduct his relatively new piece, City Noir, composed for and premiered by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 and performed here by the NSO for the first time. Adams conducted the piece last summer at the Proms, and he tried to wring every ounce of energy he could from it here. Taking the microphone, he described the work as an homage to Hollywood and film noir scores, but where film composers have to write compactly, to create an entire atmosphere in a brief time, Adams luxuriates in each texture, seeming to do less with more, as it were, much of it forgettable. One could imagine stock movie scenes corresponding to each section: the big sweep of the opening for the opening credits; a jazz section with hot saxophone solo, drums, and pizzicato bass setting the tone; a tender theme for violins con sordini for the entrance of the heroine; a murder in the dark of night in the second movement, against a backdrop of sirens and wailing horns; a California cool trumpet solo and the chug-chug-chugging of a locomotive in the third movement. With such a large orchestra, it seemed like the score should have had greater variation of color, but there was a busy sameness to it -- for all the percussion crammed at the back (20 tuned gongs!), one noticed it almost not at all.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, John Adams roots himself in tradition, but on his own terms (Washington Post, May 31)

Although it ended with Los Angeles, the concert opened with Rome, in a suave performance of Ottorino Respighi's Fontane di Roma. Four of the city's most famous fountains were evoked, from the placid, rolling, slightly lazy sound of the Valle Giulia, with its lush strings, to the crashing swell of the Triton, the celesta twinkles of the Trevi, and the tolling bell in the distance behind the Villa Medici as the sun sets. Respighi used his large orchestra more brilliantly than Adams did, and there are many effects in there that were stolen by later Hollywood composers. In between was Ravel's bluesy, saccharine G major piano concerto, with Jeremy Denk as soloist (last heard, inevitably, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet). The concerto was probably the work most at risk of causing trouble for a sub-standard conductor, and there were a few slipshod moments. Mostly the piece lacked an edge, a distinctive vision, other than what Denk and the musicians worked out together. The tender second movement seems easy on the surface but is difficult to pull off -- is it emotions on the sleeve or something enigmatic like Satie's Gnossiennes? Whatever it might have been, this performance left me bored, even the "dizzy fingers" stuff in the third movement, given plenty of improvisatory spin by Denk.

This concert repeats tonight and tomorrow night (May 31 and June 1), in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

John Adams Residency, Day 3

Adams, Son of Chamber Symphony, ICE, J. Adams (2011) [REVIEW]

John Adams has not done himself any favors during his residency this week at the Library of Congress. In his programming of the first three concerts, he has put his own music up against the titans of the 20th century: Béla Bartók and Leoš Janáček for Road Movies, and last night it was Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg sandwiching his Son of Chamber Symphony. On one hand, as Adams himself acknowledged, only a fool would give himself that kind of competition, but on the other hand setting a high bar made the overall result of these concerts that much better.

Adams has been particularly blessed in his choice of performers, especially Jennifer Koh and last night's featured group, the International Contemporary Ensemble. Adams did the honors at the podium, but frankly these expert musicians could likely have done just as well in this repertoire without a conductor. They turned in thrilling accounts of two gigantic masterpieces of the modern period, beginning with Stravinsky's Grande Suite, the music for L'Histoire du Soldat. It is in many ways the preferable way to listen to this work, without the possibly silly story of the devil and the soldier, as in the last performance of the work under review. Certainly, this was a superior performance musically, too, with the fine violinist Jennifer Curtis taming the demanding solo part in the "Trois Danses" movement, the mesmerizing pairing of clarinet and bassoon in the "Pastorale," and a careful attention to balance and the scope of the room's acoustic throughout. The acerbic triumph of the march movements was rendered with plenty of clatter, right down to the chilling all-percussion conclusion.

Schoenberg's first Kammersymphonie (op. 9), which featured on the notorious Skandalkonzert on March 31, 1913, in Vienna, was the other giant in the room. It is hard to imagine this often urbane, even harmonically lush work causing protests or a brawl -- Alban Berg's Altenberg-Lieder were apparently the straw that broke the camel's back -- because now one admires it principally for its range of textures, harmony, tempo, and character and for the symphonic scope that Schoenberg achieved with just fifteen solo instruments and no percussion. Its principal theme -- a series of rising fourths that often resolve into (gasp!) a major chord -- these days always sounds like perhaps the most famous appropriation of quartal writing, the theme for the television series Star Trek by Alexander Courage.

My estimation of the Adams work featured here, Son of Chamber Symphony, has not changed much since I reviewed the recording made by John Adams and the ICE a few years ago. My reservations were brought into relief here by the juxtaposition with the Schoenberg, which Adams acknowledged was the inspiration for his two chamber symphonies. The Adams is a virtuosic tour de force, which the ICE nails firmly on the head in an often brain-spinning way, but it achieves much less in terms of color and variation. Lots of noodling around, lots of accents that shift the sense of meter (Stravinsky's influence is more important there), and a seemingly breathless continuity in the outer movements. It is thrilling to hear in a performance this good, but like a meringue it ends up leaving one with little substance or nourishment.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Composer John Adams leads an evening of music for the mind, if not the heart (Washington Post, May 27)

Even less impressive was the new work, La forma dello spazio by Canadian composer Zosha di Castri (b. 1985), a trifle of less than ten minutes that played around with the performance space, I guess, by having the clarinetist and flutist placed at the back of the auditorium. Clusters of various kinds arose at the front and were taken up behind the listener, with some instrumental effects (plucked piano, a credit card used on the cello's strings, air blown through the flute tonelessly, a rattle of some kind attached to the pianist's ankle) layered on top of them. Some hair-raising microtonal sounds and glissandi were mildly interesting, and there was an early entrance by the violinist (corrected by Adams, although it didn't really make any difference), but in the one end one wondered exactly what Adams heard in the piece to champion it in this way.

John Adams Residency, Day 2

E.-P. Salonen, Lachen verlernt (inter alia), J. Koh (2009) Adams, Road Movies (inter alia), J. Koh, R. Uchida (2010)

Half of the concerts in the Library of Congress's residency with composer John Adams are in the Coolidge Auditorium, with the other half at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, including last night's recital by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Reiko Uchida. The only apparent benefit gained by doing this is that one does not have to go through a security check at the Atlas, a tradeoff probably not worth the loss in acoustics. The audience being mostly the same as the one that shows up at the Library of Congress, it seems unlikely that anyone who would go hear Jennifer Koh at the Atlas would not, for whatever reason, go to hear her at the Library of Congress, where it is both easier to park and closer to a Metro stop. Not that I mind one way or the other, since both venues are about the same distance from me, but it does seem like the Atlas venture is mostly about adopting some kind of hip appeal.

Adams explained the concept of this program as centered on "what's ethnic about a work of art," combining music that had some "connection with the demotic, with the daily culture" of a place. That included a diptych of two central European composers both known for their absorption of folk music and the rhythms of their languages. Koh gave Janáček's violin sonata a compelling sense of narrative, a speech-like fluidity, with a beautifully limpid tone on the violin, especially velvety and soft in the striking second movement ("Ballada"). At the keyboard Uchida was also best here, creating a misty veil of sound with the rolled piano chords, although there was some stickiness in her octaves in the first movement. The third movement had a folk-like heartiness, with Koh drawing out a raucous tone through the mute in the B section. Bartók's 1944 sonata for solo violin, on the second half, was the highlight of this excellent program, strikingly different in its folk sublimation from the Janáček. Each phrase and idea was so clearly etched, all the more remarkable because Koh played without a score, making some vicious sounds but also playing with many colors and exceptional suavity. The fuga, with all of its demanding double stops, was so clear and clean in the overlaying of contrapuntal voices, with almost faultless intonation. The last two movements featured a symphonic conception of sound, with solo sections answered by fuller textures as in a sort of concerto, and the nocturnal serenade section marked by ghostly echos in harmonics. A tour de force performance all around.

Where Koh and Uchida sounded best together was in the oldest piece on the program, Schubert's A major sonata (D. 574), the almost banal A theme of the first movement treated guilelessly, with Koh's radiant simplicity of tone and Uchida's light, lovely touch serving this tuneful music so well. It is a happy-go-lucky sort of piece, its rollicking scherzo second movement playful more than mischievous and a tender-hearted trio -- unfortunately, the return to the scherzo caught the page-turner by surprise, the first of two such gaffes. Uchida's consummate professionalism kicked in and she recovered expertly in spite of it all. The slow movement had no whiff of tragedy about it, just avian trills and twittering traded between the instruments, while in the finale the piece finally cut loose and danced its way home. The contemporary slot was filled by Esa-Pekka Salonen's Lachen verlernt, a chaconne composed in 2002, which Koh also played at Strathmore last December. As an unaccompanied piece it demanded comparison with the Bartók, against which it held its own both formally and in terms of virtuosity, music that is enjoyable both to listen to and to reflect on afterward, again impressing by Koh's pure intonation, even in double stops.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, At Atlas, Jennifer Koh offers an unforgettable whirlwind of sound (Washington Post, May 25)

Finally it was time for some Adams, represented here by Road Movies, an homage to the delights of driving on the open road in the American West, written for a commission from the Library of Congress's McKim Fund in 1995. The composer described his connection to the "ethnic" in music as represented by blues, country fiddling, and the American music of Stravinsky. Adams once described the thing he disliked most about the serial, academic styles of composition was that "rhythm was atomized," a trend that his infectiously metrical, syncopated music -- and Road Movies is a prime example -- shows as a dead end. The first movement, in spite of that second page-turning mishap, flowed and turned in a mesmerizing way, down to the high flautando violin note that ends it. The second movement, a "desert landscape" as Adams put it, with its many blue notes, was punctuated by the croaking low F of Koh's scordatura tuning -- Adams calls for the G string to be tuned a whole step down. The wild ride of the third movement was breath-suspending in its quickness, prickling on jabs of sound from the keyboard.

John Adams Residency, Day 1

Fellow Traveler: Complete String Quartet Works of John Adams, Attacca Quartet (released on March 26, 2013) Azica ACD-71280 | 65' Beethoven, String Quartets, op. 18/2+3, Quatuor Mosaïques

John Adams is in town for a couple weeks, curating a residency at the Library of Congress this week and then serving as guest conductor with the National Symphony Orchestra next week. The first concert organized by the celebrated American composer at the Library, last night, featured the Attacca Quartet, a young string quartet that has recently recorded everything Adams has written for their combination of instruments. In charmingly self-deprecating comments before a full house, Adams described the program as a "Best Hits" selection from that disc.

These four musicians are suited to the Adams style, playing with a bristling energy, often sharp with jabbed elbows but sometimes short on reserve and subtlety. They began with seven of the nine movements, slightly reordered, from John's Book of Alleged Dances, a gutsy piece from 1994. Some of these pieces are synchronized with prerecorded tracks of music for prepared piano, which makes for an unsettling effect at times, a sort of modernist metronome that steals away the flexibility otherwise available to the performers. That seems to be part of what Adams was after, a tribute to the mechanization of music at the hands of John Cage, the piano's clicks and rattles like a "pygmy gamelan," as the composer once put it. In Alligator escalator the strings drew out scratchy tones near their bridges, with the many syncopated rhythms jarring and dance-like. The hoedown of Dogjam seemed to get a little disjointed from the recording, eventually righting itself, while the high cello passages in Pavane: She's So Fine were precariously sketchy. The compelling rhythm -- the rock anthem of Toot Nipple, and the bluesy roll of Judah to Ocean -- is impossible not to like.

The more classically oriented String Quartet, from 2008, is one of Adams's most skilful accomplishments (see my review of the recording by the St. Lawrence Quartet). The Attaccas gave each of the long first movement's contrasting sections its own zing -- singing melodies, pinging notes over repeating motifs (reminiscent of Adams's piano piece Phrygian Gates), a buzzing scherzo, a floating pianissimo passage, endless drive, glassy and serene slow bits, the delightful conclusion with mutes on, some notes glinting out of the murk. The second movement, a cranked-up wild ride, was right in the group's wheelhouse, and they gave it all the zip they could muster.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Attacca Quartet delivers first concert in John Adams series at Library of Congress (Washington Post, May 24)

While the Adams pieces were top-notch, the other two selections felt much less lived in. Adams was instrumental in organizing a commission for composer Timothy Andres, heard at the Library just last month, from the Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music. Andres's compact string quartet, called Early to Rise, did not all that much with a theme drawn from Robert Schumann's Gesänge der Frühe, lots of ideas with little for the ear to take hold of and with surprisingly little variation of texture (the slow section essentially just a series of vaguely tonal homophonic chords, for example). I am always glad to hear new music, but if my first hearing of this piece was also my last, I would be neither surprised nor disappointed. In a Beethoven string quartet, op. 18/2, the group had a much stronger score, of which their overly hasty and abrasive interpretation drew forth relatively little. Intonation issues and crazy elisions of the fastest passages abounded, with one bad clunker somewhere in the cello or viola in the third movement, and the second movement, which rests entirely on the cantilena of the first violinist, was just not all that lovely. Not surprisingly, a brash and athletic finale had plenty of spunk but little wry humor, ultimately sounding quite hollow.

The John Adams residency at the Library of Congress continues through Saturday, with performances at the Library and at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, all free.

Ionarts-at-Large: The Currentzis Dances

Orchestra-gossip needs to be taken with a grain of salt, or sometimes a satchel. The young conductor Teodor Currentzis, dubbed by the press as “The Miracle of Novosibirsk” after impressive opera performances in Baden-Baden, occasionally meets the verbal equivalent of shrugged shoulders from musicians. But unflattering comments say little about actual outcomes—and especially the Munich Philharmonic exercised in a long field study proving just that: Consistent grumbling about Christian Thielemann was consistently accompanied by the best performances of that orchestra in a decade. Not having heard Currentzis’ last concert in Munich (Schnittke, Ravel, Resphigi, and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto with Arabella Steinbacher), all I had to go by was the superb impression that he and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra left in Mieczysław Weinberg’s “The Passenger” from Bregenz. (Best of 2011).

J.Adams, The Chairman Dances, Harmonielehre, etc., S.Rattle / CoBSO EMI S.Prokofiev, Symphonies 5 & 7, K.Tennstedt / BRSO PROFIL Hänssler

The concert on Wednesday, February 15^th, also went some way to back that discrepancy of perception up. The Greek founder of Musica Aeterna who headed the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre (he is now at the Perm Opera) delivered a very solid program of Adams, Schumann, and Prokofiev. He opened with John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances”—and along with the eponymous Mao danced, in a colorful array of excited windmill-movements—the wiry conductor. All smiles, with long bobbed hair, and India-rubber limbs, Currentzis looks like a master of ceremonies at MIT’s Harry Potter convention. An enthusiastic image, and a slightly ridiculous one. The orchestra, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm, played well through the fragrant-minimalist score, with enough routine and class necessary for it to be a successful curtain raiser.

Originally Adams’s “The Chairman Dances” had been cut from the second of three programs on Thursday, a ‘Young Audience Concert’, but that perplexing decision—John Adams would seem particularly suited for young audiences, better than the Schumann Concerto—had been reversed on short notice. Simplistic and juicy, Adams speaks the vernacular of the modern classical popular; a 1985 Divertimento in mildly oriental foxtrot form.

The Schumann Piano Concerto with soloist Mikhail Mordvinov (replacing Radu Lupu on short notice) was eloquent and charming, performed with some understatement but still enthused and not without slips—with a more impressive first than subsequent movement(s). The encore (Schumann’s Arabeske), well… it was an opportunity for Mordvinov to present himself before such a large audience and he seized it even if the applause didn’t exactly demand it.

Prokofiev Seventh Symphony is a tricky work to bring off well (it’s not very well served on recording, either, except by Järvi / Scottish SO and Tennstedt / BRSO), and that made the performance at hand so impressive: Currentzis handled the feeling and tenderness of the symphony, its quirky sounds, with assurance. Under his hands, the side-by-side of Prokofiev’s children-like naïveté, his veteran assuredness and deft rhythmic handling sounded perfectly organic—and the orchestra went along well enough, especially considering this was the first night of the run. As a little treat, Currentzis played the symphony with both alternate endings: the quiet original first, and then, after a little pause, the few bars of upbeat compromise that Prokofiev grudgingly added.

Son of Chamber Symphony: It's Alive

See my review of a new recording of the string quartet and second chamber symphony of John Adams, in the Sunday Arts section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, John Adams’s String Quartet outshines his ‘Son of Chamber Symphony’ on new CD
Washington Post, September 25, 2011

J. Adams, Son of Chamber Symphony / String Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, St. Lawrence String Quartet, J. Adams (released on May 31, 2011) Nonesuch 523014-2 | 54'

In 2007, American composer John Adams said he was working on a follow-up to his “Chamber Symphony,” composed in 1992. He joked then that he was thinking of calling it “Son of Chamber Symphony,” which has a much better ring for a sequel than the more pedestrian “No. 2.” The name stuck, and “Son of Chamber Symphony” made its premiere later that fall.

The title makes explicit the parentage of the later work, and in this case it may be a little too much of “like father, like son.” The elder “Chamber Symphony” was a rock-fueled bacchanal in the outer movements, paced by the trap set, with cowbell-smack echoes of Bernstein’s “Mambo” in the first movement, “Mongrel Airs.” (That movement was named “to honor a British critic who complained that my music lacked breeding,” as Adams famously put it, so I had better choose my words carefully.) As with so much of Adams’s music, one has the sense of a sort of mathematical schema in both works, a set of patterns in each movement, wound up like a clock mechanism and allowed to tick to its conclusion. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Robert Baird, Recording of September 2011: Son of Chamber Symphony (Stereophile, September 1)

Christopher Abbot, John Adams, Son of Chamber Symphony on Nonesuch (Fanfare, August 20)

Robert Battey, St. Lawrence Quartet impresses with new Adams, Viñao (Washington Post, December 7, 2009)

Mark Swed, John Adams has a 'Son' that he can be proud of (Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2007)

Ionarts-at-Large: The Courtship of Andris Nelsons

As Andris Nelsons led the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in two concerts on Thursday and Friday, two impressions were paramount: “Isn’t it a little early for a courtship concert?” And “the match looks mighty fine”. The concert with the young (32) Latvian conductor and Mariss Jansons protégé, currently the music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, had all the hallmarks of a mating ritual: The first half was given over to Charles Ives (“The Unanswered Question”), John Adams (“Slonimsky’s Earbox”), and Igor Stravinsky (“Le chant du rossignol”) next to which Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony in the second half looked a little out of place. It’s as if the conductor wanted to show (or be shown), all in one concert, that he can not only program smartly but also do justice to warhorses.

The presence of HD cameras in every corner of the crammed Herkulessaal looked conspicuously like Bavarian Radio showing off some of the inherent advantages of a radio orchestra over, oh, say, a city philharmonic: We’ll do live broadcasts of your concerts and we’ll get you a DVD of the event for Christmas. In the end, I wouldn’t have been half surprised if they had publically promised him a new concert hall on top of it (something Jansons works hard on, given the inadequacy of the status quo of quasi BRSO-homelessness).

In terms of programming, the high hopes I had for this concert—considering Nelsons among the most promising conductors out there—were fulfilled even before a note was played. Ives, Adams, and Stravinsky don’t just give the ear something it isn’t wont to hear very often*, they all sharpen our ears for musical interrelations. In Ives a voice (trumpet) repeatedly utters a question into the wistful void—perhaps time itself— represented by the hauntingly simple, ever unchanging melody of triads that the string section provides as a shimmering backdrop. Trumpet and strings are ideally placed off stage. In the Herkulessaal that meant behind the stage (trumpet) and all the way across the hall, in the foyer, bleeding into the auditorium from behind the audience, with Nelsons solidly out of sigh. On stage are merely four flutes (alternatively woodwinds), and they answer the trumpet. Gently first (never timid), but increasingly agitated and frustrated over the futility of their answers, as the trumpet merely keeps repeating it’s naively phrased question, it’s innocent incomprehension. “…but why??” There are many answers, of course, but none can make the question go away.

Adams’ “Earbox” is like a shot in the arm after that; incidentally a work sounding much more like Stravinsky than Philip Glass. Stampeding with wild sameness, twice as long as Ives and probably ten times as many notes, it eventually ends as abruptly as it began, as if any prolonging of the relentless rambunctiousness couldn’t add anything anymore that hadn’t already been said. The opening of “Earbox” foreshadowed (in the performance timeline, that is) “Rossignol”, or more to the point: quotes it. Without knowing the real timeline it’d be near-impossible to hear who quotes whom, though, since the 80 years difference between the Adams (1996) and the Stravinsky (1917) are all but inaudible… just as it isn’t in the least obvious that the Ives (1906) should be the oldest piece of the lot.

The Stravinsky, essentially the orchestral suite from the last two acts of Stravinsky’s 1914 opera “Le rossignol” offered, as all that had come before, precision and well defined, snappy edges—with the principals (the various woodwinds and especially the flute and the first violin) excelling. Just as the Adams refers to that Nightingale (specifically and generally), the end of Stravinsky—trumpet over repetitive string figures harks back to Ives and the first half thus comes full circle.


Would Nelsons, who has many of the same features as his mentor (the attention to detail, unwillingness to neglect transparency even at higher decibels, but with a healthy dash of excitement added to it all), make something special of Dvořák’s standard? I can’t deny that I’d rather have seen a Rubbra symphony or a Tveitt concerto in place of “From the New World” (and not just because I have a an obscurity-fetish), but Nelsons is also one of the few conductors from whom I would actually expect something special even in the most standard repertoire. I think immediately of his recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, where it is his contribution (despite his excellent soloist) that particularly raised my eyebrows. (One of my favorite recordings of the work and conveniently coupled with an ingenious Berg Concerto.)

Much of that hope was fulfilled by Nelsons crisp, loud but not too overbearing first movement, seamless and fast and with more than a whiff of Wagner coming from the climaxes and the string figures. The nicely accentuated, tastefully exaggerated performance—pianissimos hanging by a strand in the slow movement; the triangle’s ‘wakeup ring’ in the third movement feverish; the fourth movement with exalted exclamation points—hit all the right buttons with the audience. As if they were in on the deal of making mini-Jansons the successor of mentor-Jansons in the Bavarian capital, they showered Nelsons with lots of ovational love and the orchestra beamed to the last member.


* Incidentally the Munich Philharmonic had just performed the Ives in a concert this summe; under conductor Markus Stenz, with Leila Josefowicz performing the Adès Violin Concerto, and also with Dvořák’s Ninth in the second half.

Rehearsal pictures courtesy © BR Klassik.

More John Adams with the NSO

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, ed. Thomas May

The final installment in John Adams’s residency at the Kennedy Center, which has featured him as composer and conductor, opened last night with mixed results. It is always interesting, for lack of a better word, to see composers conduct their own works, and this was no exception. The spoken introductory remarks to both his works on the program, The Dharma at Big Sur and Doctor Atomic Symphony, for example, were much more meaningful coming from Adams himself. However, John Adams is not the finest conductor, and the opening piece, Britten's Four Sea Interludes from "Peter Grimes", was, unfortunately, a mess.

Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, about the marginalized fisherman accused of killing his apprentice, was originally written with six orchestral interludes, four of which Britten made into an orchestral work. The music moves from hauntingly jaunty and folksy melodies to the sweeping and destructive sounds of the sea, but the orchestra was woefully out of sync. Entrances cascaded from instrument to instrument, melodies lacked internal precision, and each orchestral section seemed incongruous with the next. Of particular note were John Adams’s motions, which often seemed to correspond to a completely different work than what was actually being performed. His gestures were often large and strict when the sound issued was gentle, among other inconsistencies. Whatever the problem with the players or conductor, there was certainly a disconnect. As a result, the Britten came off as wholly disjointed and lacked any precision or color.

The musicians were redeemed, however, in the next work, Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur, which featured the brilliant Leila Josefowicz on electric violin. The juxtaposition of electric violin atop an entirely acoustic orchestra is a powerful sound and Josefowicz certainly has the chops for the piece, which is fairly non-stop for the violinist. Here, musicians and conductor finally connected in what became a beautifully rolling, raga-inspired seascape, and Josefowicz handled the part with grace and resilience. Adams’s other work on the program, the closing Doctor Atomic Symphony, was prefaced by a video of Gerald Finley, who created the role of Oppenheimer, singing the shattering aria that confronts Oppenheimer's invention and its devastating consequences. The symphony itself ends with this aria (played beautifully on the trumpet by Steven Hendrickson), built up to by eerie discordant sounds and “panic music” that captures all too well the frenetic energy surrounding the development of the bomb.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, As flawed conductor, Adams offers insights into the music (Washington Post, May 21) Armando Bayolo, The Dharma on the Potomac (Sequenza21/, May 21)

Programmed in the middle, Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice, op. 4, showcased slightly better ensemble work than that heard during the Britten, though the piece was still lackluster and without rigor. It is unfortunate that for such a wonderfully pictorial and descriptive program all around, the results were so mixed. John Adams’s ability to lead an orchestra is questionable and all in all dissatisfying. However, Adams is a brilliant composer who can create a considerable impact, notably during the powerful and emotional conclusion of The Dharma at Big Sur. But as much deserved respect as he gets, John Adams is above all a composer, and not a conductor.

This concert will be repeated this afternoon (May 21, 1:30 pm) and tomorrow evening (May 22, 8 pm), in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

NSO Puts John Adams in Perspective

Read my review published today on the Washington Post Web site:

Charles T. Downey, Adams brings his own "Perspectives" to the NSO
Washington Post, May 14, 2010

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, ed. Thomas May

American composer John Adams appeared on the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra last night, continuing a series of concerts at the Kennedy Center devoted to his music that began with Jennifer Koh's recital on Sunday. Composers are possibly too close to their own work to know how to treat it objectively, as a conductor must, to obtain the best result. Yet a composer-led performance, precisely because of that subjectivity, can also tell you something unique about what the composer was thinking.

The Adams-on-Adams treatment was applied to “The Wound-Dresser,” a 1988 symphonic setting of Walt Whitman’s recollections of his service as a caregiver to wounded troops in the makeshift Civil War hospitals along Washington’s National Mall. It was not necessarily the work one most wanted to hear from Adams, not least because he also conducted it in a similar program with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007. The piece can be powerful on first hearing, but after repeated listening its extended elegiac tone can become static. The orchestra played the pulsing chords elegantly, with electronic synthesizer touches recalling the timbre of a glass harmonica. Eric Owens lent a smooth, intense bass-baritone to the vocal part, supported by ghostly violin solos and anguished, disembodied cries from the solo trumpet that strained painfully into the stratosphere. [Continue reading]

National Symphony Orchestra
With John Adams (guest conductor) and Eric Owens (bass-baritone)
John Adams: Perspectives
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

PREVIOUSLY:

• John Adams with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (October 6, 2007)
  
• John Adams, Composers in Conversation with Marin Alsop (September 27, 2007)

EXPANDED COVERAGE:

Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man

From Howard Pollack's biography of Copland: Copland conceived Billy the Kid for a 1938 production with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan, a traveling company formed with choreographer George Balanchine, which later reassembled and eventually became New York City Ballet. He worked with choreographer Eugene Loring to adapt the life of Billy the Kid from a book by Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid. Copland incorporated six actual cowboy tunes in the score (Great Granddad, Whooppee Ti Yi Yo Get along little dogies, Old Chisholm Trail, Old Paint, Dying Cowboy, Trouble for the Range Cook), altering them to suit his music, later recalling the irony that he arranged these American folk songs in Paris, living on the Rue de Rennes.

From The John Adams Reader, edited by Thomas May: The Wound-Dresser is set to some of the words from the devastating Civil War poem by Walt Whitman. It was composed at a time when Adams's father was dying of Alzheimer's and his mother's life was focused on caring for him: "I was plunged into an awareness not only of dying, but also for the person who cares for the dying. [... The work] is a statement about human compassion that is acted out on a daily basis, quietly and unobtrusively and unselfishly and unfailingly. Another poem in the same volume states its theme in other words: 'Those who love each other shall become invincible'." (quoted by Sarah Cahill)

Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Peter Dickinson

Barber adapted the Adagio for Strings from the middle movement of his own string quartet, premiered at the Library of Congress in 1937. After the premiere, Barber heavily revised the final movement, and the second-movement Adagio was arranged several times and in different ways (not all by Barber himself). Barber immediately understood the success of the Adagio, reportedly remarking, "It's a knockout!"; the piece later became a bit of an albatross around his neck, like Ravel and Bolero. Menotti later recalled (in an interview with Peter Dickinson) that Barber "was not particularly fond of the String Quartet, but he did like the Adagio and decided to orchestrate it. He wrote it in Austria at St. Wolfgang. [...] He did mind that it was always played at funerals. As a matter of fact, I was careful not to have it played at his funeral because I knew he'd rather have the croutons [sprinkled on his grave, as he joked with his friends -- some did it at his funeral] than the Adagio for Strings!"

Julian Rushton, Elgar: Enigma Variations "Composers commonly go out of fashion shortly after their death; Elgar achieved this in his lifetime." (p. 3) Elgar, Enigma Variations, cond. Elgar

Of Elgar's Enigma Variations, John Adams notes, "There is a recording of the Enigma Variations made in the late 1920’s. Any conductor today taking the piece up must listen carefully to this recording, for it reveals a kind of approach to orchestral performance that has all but disappeared in the intervening years. The string playing is full of rich, drooping portamenti, a kind of melodic slipping and sliding that listeners today only associate with corny old movie music from the silent film era. But in the context of Elgar’s music it sounds warm and deeply expressive." Adams has more thoughts on the piece at his blog today.

Julian Rushton specifies that the word "Enigma" was added above the theme by A. J. Jaeger (who is cast as Nimrod), on Elgar's instruction, when the work went to publication. Rushton concludes that "Enigma" is not the title of the composition, "but an emblem for the theme" (p. 1). He catalogues the variations as follows: 1. Caroline Alice Edgar, the composer's wife; 2. Hew David Steuart-Powell, amateur pianist; 3. Richard Baxter Townshend, scholar and eccentric; 4. William Meath Baker, squire of Hasfield Court; 5. Richard Penrose Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold; 6. Isabel Fitton, amateur violist; 7. Arthur Troyte Griffith, architect; 8. Winfred Norbury, secretary of Worcestershire Philharmonic Society; 9. A. J. Jaeger, publishing manager of Novello's publishing house, who advised and supported Elgar (cast as Nimrod, the mighty Biblical hunter); 10. Dora Penny, later wife of Richard Powell; 11. George Robertson Sinclair, organist at Hereford and owner of a bulldog named Dan -- the music does not represent Sinclair's playing or the bells at Hereford, but Dan falling into the Wye river, paddling upstream, and barking with satisfaction at climbing out of the water; 12. Basil Nevinson, amateur cellist; 13. Lady Mary Lygon, of Madresfield Court; and 14. Elgar himself.

Doctor Atomic

John Adams, Doctor Atomic, G. Finley, J. Rivera, E. Owens, De Nederlandse Opera, L. Renes (released on September 30, 2008) Opus Arte 0998 D

John Adams scored a success, with a few caveats, with the premiere of Dr. Atomic, which he describes as "longer and more complex than any of my previous stage works," at San Francisco Opera in 2005. The work's major failure, according to many critics, was the non-narrative style of the libretto (.PDF file), assembled from documentary sources by Peter Sellars, who also directed the opera. In the interview included as an extra on the DVD of the opera, Sellars proudly says that the characters speak only words that are actually attributed to them, but even with the use of poetry for aria moments (Baudelaire in the Oppenheimers' bedroom scene, Donne at the end of Act I, the Tewa song of Pasqualita) the libretto is leaden. In spite of the focus on sources, Sellars missed the chance to tell the real story of the Manhattan Project, working as he was from his well-known, rather one-sided political viewpoint. As someone who is close to a scientist who worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory, although many years after the time of the development of the atomic bomb, I know the matter of the building and even use of the weapon to be much more complicated than is shown here, and not only for the scientific errors, noticed by a Berkeley physicist at the time of the premiere and finally corrected for the production at De Nederlandse Opera, recorded for this DVD.

Still, the opera is a compelling piece of music, if not necessarily of drama or history, especially because of the fine work of this generally strong and attractive cast. The opera is in its revised (one presumes, final) version, but it is possible to imagine a more effective production, although the sets (Adrianne Lobel) and costumes (Dunya Ramicova) are beautiful. Sellars' most irritating directorial tics are on display, with the odd emoting hand movements, most distracting when poor Gerald Finley, who sings so well and incarnates the dashing, arrogant Oppenheimer, has to macarena his way through his big aria, "Batter my heart." Dancers choreographed by Lucinda Childs invade many of the scenes, with Jerome Robbins-like movements that mostly give a discordant, Broadway feel to the action (The Bomb!). Worst of all, the video direction, also by Sellars, is nauseating in its overuse of rapid cuts, clumsy zooms, awkward pans, and closeups that deprive the viewer of the vantage of the entire stage far too often, focusing instead on details that destroy the illusion of opera (the fake doll that stands in for Oppenheimer's baby, the microphones and monitors taped to the singers' ears, including one that stubbornly resists staying in place for Eric Owens). Especially at the current high price for this 2-DVD set, this is not recommended for immediate purchase but is the only game in town.

168'09"

John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony / Guide to Strange Places, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, D. Robertson (released on July 28, 2009) Nonesuch 468220-2

John Adams himself conducted the world premiere of his symphonic distillation of music from Doctor Atomic, with the BBC Symphony at the Proms two years ago. However, the composer dedicated the final version of the Doctor Atomic Symphony to conductor David Robertson (whose misspelled name on the cover delayed the release of this new disc by a couple weeks). He led the American premiere performance with his current band, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, recorded live here. Adams tightened up the score considerably, cutting it from four movements lasting about 45 minutes to three movements in just over 24 minutes. The final version includes not all that much of the material from the opera, focusing on the scientific parts of the story and leaving out the, well, female parts of the opera. Also of interest is the fact that Adams chose to conclude the symphonic score with an orchestral arrangement of Oppenheimer's "Batter My Heart," an acknowledgment perhaps that this aria, which concludes the first act, is actually the climax of the opera, rather than the explosion of the actual bomb.

One of the better symphonic works by John Adams in recent years, Guide to Strange Places, from 2001 and like the Doctor Atomic Symphony recorded here for the first time, first reached my ears in a live performance by the Cleveland Orchestra two years ago. Inspired by a tourist guide book about unusual sites in Provence that Adams spotted in a book store, the work is a semi-autobiographical journey, based on memories from the composer's family vacation. Like the revised version of the Doctor Atomic Symphony, its appeal has to do with its almost constant bubbling motion, here evoking the rattling pulse of travel. The use of a steady motoric pulse, against which accented syncopations clash jarringly, does recall Stravinsky, especially The Rite of Spring most clearly in the early sections. What strikes the ears many times, in the quirks of the orchestration as textures are piled together and untangled again, is the composer's sense of humor. Insightful liner notes by Jeremy Denk are a bonus.

47'03"