Adams, John (1947- )

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      At 75, the Ojai Music Festival Stays Focused on the Future

      by

      This storied California haven of contemporary classical music returned, organized by the composer John Adams.OJAI, Calif. — Returning is a process. Rarely is it linear.The Ojai Music Festival, for instance, returned, Sept. 16-19, to celebrate its 75th year after a long pandemic absence. But there were setbacks among the comebacks. Compromises were made to accommodate its move from spring to the final days of summer. An artist was held up in Spain by travel restrictions. Diligently enforced safety measures slightly harshed the vibe of this storied event, a rigorous yet relaxing haven for contemporary music tucked in an idyllic valley of straight-faced mysticism and sweet Pixie tangerines.This edition of the festival is the first under the leadership of Ara Guzelimian, back at the helm after a run in the 1990s. Each year, the person in his position organizes the programming with a new music director; for Guzelimian’s debut, he chose the composer John Adams, the paterfamilias of American classical music, who happens to have been born the year of the first festival. Uninterested in a retrospective for the milestone anniversary, they billed their concerts as a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future.But in music, past, present and future are always informing one another. Bach and Beethoven haunted new and recent works; the pianist Vikingur Olafsson treated Mozart, as he likes to say, as if the ink had just dried on the score. There is no looking forward without looking back.The Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie led a storytelling hour on a misty field at Soule Park on Friday.Timothy TeagueGuzelimian and Adams looked back about far as possible in weaving the valley’s Indigenous history into the festival. The cover of its program book was the Cindy Pitou Burton photograph “Ghost Poppy” — the flower’s name given by the Chumash people, the first known inhabitants of this area, who after the arrival of Europeans were nearly annihilated by disease and violence, and who no longer have any land in Ojai.It’s a history that was shared, among more lighthearted tales, by the Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, who opened Friday’s programming with storytelling on a misty field at Soule Park; that evening, she began a concert with a blessing.Despite the best of intentions, these were among the more cringe-worthy moments of the festival. The predominantly white, moneyed audience responded to details of colonial brutality with an obliviously affirmative hum, not unlike the way it later cheered on Rhiannon Giddens’s “Build a House,” a searing and sweeping indictment of American history — as if these listeners weren’t implicated in its message.Members of the Attacca Quartet with Giddens and her partner, Francesco Turrisi.Timothy TeagueThe festival was at its best when the music spoke for itself. (Most of the concerts are streaming online.) It should be said, though, that the programming still had its limits; just as this review can’t possibly address the entire event, Ojai’s three days (and a brief prelude the evening before) represented only a sliver of the field, and excluded some of the thornier, more experimental work being done.Adams was nevertheless interested, it seemed, in artists who operate as if liberated from orthodoxy and genre — far from what he has called “the bad old days” of modernism’s grip.Beyond the composers, that translated to the performers, a roster that included the festival orchestra (no mere pickup group with the brilliant violinist Alexi Kenney as its concertmaster); members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. And soloists like the violinist — for one piece, also a violist — Miranda Cuckson, who summoned the force of a full ensemble in Anthony Cheung’s “Character Studies” and Dai Fujikura’s “Prism Spectra,” and nimbly followed Bach’s Second Partita with Kaija Saariaho’s “Frises” in place of the partita’s famous Chaconne finale.The violinist Miranda Cuckson in Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, conducted by his father, John Adams.Timothy TeagueOlafsson, whose recordings have demonstrated his brilliance as a programmer — with a sharp ear for connections within a single composer’s body of work, or across centuries and genres — persuasively moderated a conversation among Rameau, Debussy and Philip Glass, as well as another of Mozart and his contemporaries, with masterly voicing and enlightening clarity.Giddens was also at ease in a range of styles, her polymathic musicality and chameleonic voice deployed as affectingly in an Adams aria as in American folk. Performing with her own band (whose members include Francesco Turrisi, her partner) she was deadpan and charismatic; alongside the Attacca Quartet, she simply sat at a microphone with a laser-focus stare, commanding the stage with only her sound.Attacca’s appearance was all too brief, but could justify their own turn at directing the festival one day. Whether in works by Adams, Jessie Montgomery or Caroline Shaw, in Paul Wiancko’s vividly episodic “Benkei’s Standing Death” or Gabriella Smith’s jam-like “Carrot Revolution,” these open-eared and open-minded players don’t seem to bring a piece to the stage until it is etched into their bones, so fully is each score embodied.There was overlap of composer and performer in Timo Andres, whose works were well represented but who also served as the soloist — twinkling, patient and tender — in Ingram Marshall’s humbly gorgeous piano concerto “Flow.”Andres later gave a chilly Sunday morning recital that opened with selections from “I Still Play,” a set of miniatures written for Robert Hurwitz, the longtime and influential leader of Nonesuch Records. It continued with one of Samuel Adams’s Impromptus, a work of inspired keyboard writing designed to complement Schubert, with flashes of that composer along with warmth and subtle harmonic shading to match. And it ended with the first live performance of Smith’s “Imaginary Pancake,” which had a respectable debut online early in the pandemic but truly roared in person.In very Ojai fashion, there were so many living composers programmed that Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t even qualify as a headliner. If anything, he was a known quantity that unintentionally faded amid the novelty of other voices. Carlos Simon’s propulsive and galvanizing “Fate Now Conquers” nodded to Beethoven, but on his own brazen terms. And there continues to be nothing but promise in the emerging Inti Figgis-Vizueta, whose “To give you form and breath,” for three percussionists, slyly warped time in a juxtaposition of resonant and dull sounds of found objects like wood and planters.Much real estate was given to Gabriela Ortiz, who in addition to being performed — providing a blissfully rousing climax for the festival with an expanded version of her “La calaca” on Sunday evening — stepped in as a curator when a recital by Anna Margules was canceled because she couldn’t travel to the United States. That concert, a survey of Mexican composers, offered one of the festival’s great delights: the percussionist Lynn Vartan in Javier Álvarez’s “Temazcal,” a work for maracas and electronics that demands dance-like delivery in a revelation of acoustic possibilities from an instrument most people treat as a mere toy.From left, Emily Levin, Abby Savell and Julie Smith Phillips in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Río de la Mariposas.”Timothy TeagueOrtiz’s chamber works revealed a gift for surprising acoustic pairings, such as two harps and a steel plan in “Río de las Mariposas,” which opened a late morning concert on Sunday. It’s a sound that had a sibling in a premiere that ended that program: Dylan Mattingly’s “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum,” its title taken from the “Aeneid.”The work is also for two harps (Emily Levin and Julie Smith Phillips) — but also two pianos that, microtonally detuned, could at times be confused with a sound of steel pan. There is a slight dissonance, but not an unpleasant one; the effect is more like the distortion of memory. And there was nothing unpleasant about this cry for joy. Ecstasy emanated from the open pianos, played by Joanne Pearce Martin and Vicki Ray, as they were lightly hammered at their uppermost registers, joined by music-box twinkling in the harps.The mood turned more meditative in the comparatively subdued middle section, but the transporting thrill of the opening returned at the end: first in fragments, then full force. “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum” was the newest work at the festival, a piece that looked back on a year that was traumatic for all of us. But Mattingly met the moment with music that teemed with defiant, unflappable hope for the future. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      A Battle of Boos and Cheers at the Symphony

      by

      In the early 1980s, John Adams’s “Grand Pianola Music” defied the seriousness of classical music. Not everyone liked that.It was 1970, and the composer John Adams was tripping on LSD.He was at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and he wandered into a rehearsal for Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy,” with the eminent pianist Rudolf Serkin sitting at a Steinway.Adams saw — or thought he saw — the piano begin to stretch into a cartoonishly long limousine. A similarly fanciful vision later came to him in a dream: He imagined driving down a California highway as two Steinway grands sped past him, emitting sounds in the heroic vein of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Both of these surreal episodes contributed to Adams’s eclectic and playful “Grand Pianola Music.” The piece, which premiered in 1982, had a turbulent early history, inspiring a rare chorus of boos and drawing criticism as a symptom of American consumerism. Yet many grew to adore it — enough to garner it multiple recordings, steady representation on orchestra programs and its own episode of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Sound/Stage streaming series, out Friday.Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in “Grand Pianola Music” for the orchestra’s Sound/Stage streaming series.Farah Sosa for the LA PhilIt was an acquired taste even for its creator. “I think I said something wry in ‘Hallelujah Junction’ about wanting to take ‘Grand Pianola Music’ behind the barn and shoot it,” Adams said in a recent interview, referring to his 2008 memoir.“I’m glad I didn’t shoot it,” he added with a chuckle.If audiences were slow to accept “Grand Pianola Music,” it may have been because they didn’t know what to make of its puckish rebelliousness. The beginning, a Minimalist shimmer, was familiar territory — albeit scored idiosyncratically for winds, brasses, percussion, two pianos and a trio of siren-like singers. But the finale was audaciously melodic and openhearted, in defiance of contemporary music’s persistent, thorny seriousness.Elements foreshadowed Adams’s operas “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” At the time, however, “Grand Pianola Music” seemed a strange follow-up to the sensuous “Harmonium,” and not exactly a natural predecessor of the straight-faced and symphonically cosmic “Harmonielehre.”“It begins like ‘Harmonium,’” Adams said recently. “Then I don’t know what happened. Instead of something that people would expect, this crazy thing happened where I got into B flat major, and the piano started banging away, and I learned something about myself: that I have a bit of Mark Twain in me, I guess, because I went with it.”For the most part, though, “Grand Pianola Music” isn’t so grand. The introduction swells to a brief glimpse of the finale, but then gives way to serenity and a slow passage that recalls the spare beauty of earlier American composers like Aaron Copland. (In “Hallelujah Junction,” Adams describes the work as part of a family of pieces that “evoke the American-ness of my background, sometimes with wry humor and sometimes with a reserved, gentle nostalgia.”)This first section takes up more than two-thirds of the 30-minute running time, but Adams said it’s the second and final part, “On the Dominant Divide,” that people tend to remember. It’s also what attracted the most criticism.It starts with the pianos shimmering again, over flares of brasses that build tension until a wave of arpeggios flows from the pianists. As that subsides, a brazenly anthemic melody emerges, what Adams refers to in his book as an “Ur-melodie” that sounds familiar yet unplaceable. It is repeated, bigger each time and eventually bordering on tasteless, but held back from a tipping point by a delicate balance of irony and reaching a climax with the only text in the piece: “For I have seen the promised land.” In something of a coda, the ensemble recedes, then returns with its fullest sound yet, propulsive like a plane in takeoff — and ending just as it takes flight.“John wasn’t in any way disguising some very wonderful, big, gestural, unabashed qualities that are part of his nature,” said the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who has led works by Adams for decades, including as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020. “There’s a luxuriance in the sound, and I think a kind of ‘well, we all secretly admit that we do love certain things if we’re pressed into revealing it.’”Adams conducted the 1982 premiere at the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music festival. It was, he recalled, “a marginal catastrophe.” The singers performed with an operatic sound, which made him realize that the piece required voices with the directness of wind instruments. And people he respected frowned on the score.Adams conducted the premiere at the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music festival in 1982.via San Francisco Symphony“I really thought,” Adams said, “that I had made a mistake with this piece.”Mark Swed, now the Los Angeles Times’s classical music critic, heard “Grand Pianola Music” soon after, at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival — where, he said, its tunefulness took everyone aback, programmed among works by luminaries of the European avant-garde.“People were bewildered,” he added. “We were still trying to figure John out. What happened? Did this guy go over to the dark side or what?”Swed said that he was probably “pretty pretentious about it back then,” but that he didn’t not enjoy it: “I just didn’t know that it was OK to enjoy it.”Then “Grand Pianola Music” traveled to the East Coast. The composer Jacob Druckman programmed it for the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons ’83 festival (subtitled “The New Romanticism?”) and insisted on conducting it.The orchestra was under-rehearsed, Adams said, and at any rate Druckman didn’t have a lot of experience as a conductor. Heard on an archival recording, the piece’s crucial staccatos are imprecisely pronounced, and the finale is shockingly subdued.Even more shocking, though, is the audience’s reaction. People tend to greet new music, even if they grumble about it on the way out the concert hall, with at least polite applause. There was some of that for “Grand Pianola Music” at Avery Fisher Hall; but there was also a loud contingent of boos. They cool off quickly, but roar back the moment Adams comes onstage to take a bow with the players.“All it takes is two or three people,” Adams said, “and all you hear are the boos.”Adams around 1982, when “Grand Pianola Music” premiered.Ron Scherl/Redferns, via Getty ImagesUrsula Oppens, one of the piano soloists, grabbed Adams’s hand during the bows and told him: “Oh my God, they’re actually booing. Don’t you just love it?”Who was booing, and why, is a bit of a mystery. Swed, who had traveled to New York for the Philharmonic concert, suspected an anti-West Coast bias; the audience’s reaction made him an immediate defender of the piece. The New York Times critic John Rockwell, who wrote in a review that the boos were “a telling tribute” to the piece’s “vitality,” later guessed that the hostility was “one way for determined musical modernists to protest the creeping tide of New Romanticism.” Indeed, a publication by IRCAM, the avant-garde French electronic-music institute founded by Pierre Boulez, compared “Grand Pianola Music” to the America of Disney and McDonald’s.“We were still pretty seriously in the grip of very, very severe modernism,” Adams said. “There was this sense of gravity, that contemporary music was meant to be good for you in the way that spinach is. I think people thought I was waving my nose at the whole concept of a contemporary music festival.”He wasn’t. “I think of composers I love — whether Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ or Beethoven’s scherzos, or even those weird moments in Mahler where there’s humor,” Adams said. “And I’ve never been afraid of that.”Episodes of levity recur throughout Adams’s music; he likened the ironically effervescent British Dancing Girl aria in “The Death of Klinghoffer” to the porter scene in “Macbeth.” From that perspective, the finale of “Grand Pianola Music” seems hardly outrageous or unusual — or at all deserving of its initial reception.Adams came around on the piece, eventually deciding it was “not so bad” and finding that he enjoyed conducting it. He led the performance captured on a 2015 recording with the San Francisco Symphony, a double bill with his “Absolute Jest.” It’s an interpretation of sublime balance and articulation, the meaning of its finale — its nod to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — elevated by a clearly presented reference to “the promised land.”A new generation of conductors has also taken up “Grand Pianola Music,” such as Christian Reif, who presented it with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2018. When Reif told Adams about the coming performance, the composer responded, “Oh, you’re doing that silly piece of mine.”“This piece has so many things that I love about his music,” Reif said in an interview. “The layering of sound, the color palette of a big ensemble, the simplicity and delicacy, but also the explosions and the big dramatic, heroic moments — he doesn’t shy away. It’s unabashed, and we reveled in it.”In the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Sound/Stage episode — which blends a recently taped performance at the Hollywood Bowl with landscape video art by Deborah O’Grady, Adams’s wife — the conductor Gustavo Dudamel calls the work “one of my favorites.” His reading is impressive if only because the piece’s challenges, its inflexible rhythms and demand for absolute precision, are all the more difficult with players confined to plexiglass cubicles.“It’s a real document of the pandemic,” Adams said.Even so, Dudamel marshals a performance that radiates uplift and awe, enough to make a listener wonder what all the negativity was about in the early 1980s. Looking back, Swed said, “it sounded like John was selling out.”“But in a weird way,” he added, “maybe what he was doing was actually avant-garde.” More