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    Review: New York Philharmonic Journeys From Ocean to Desert

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    The orchestra’s final program of the season featured the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert.”Ostensibly, the New York Philharmonic’s final two programs of the season were about the earth. But they served more to illustrate the challenge composers face in translating the climate crisis to music.Last week at David Geffen Hall, Julia Wolfe’s new multimedia oratorio, “unEarth,” took an explicitly activist stance, lashing out at ecological violence and offering a path to recovery. On Thursday, John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” in its New York premiere, addressed the natural world more humbly — mourning, perhaps, the desertification of environments, but also evoking, marveling at and bowing down to forces larger than ourselves.The approach you prefer can be a matter of taste; I find observation more persuasive. Take this week. As smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted to New York, you could read that the city’s air quality was the worst on record, and understand the severity, but a step outside would reveal even more: a burning in your eyes and throat, an unrecognizable view of streets and parks obscured by an orange haze.That is the difference between “unEarth” and “Become Desert,” between declaring an emergency and bringing it to your feet. Interestingly, Wolfe and Adams have worked in both modes; her earlier oratorios have tended toward the poetic, and his “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which premiered in April, had the blunt rhetoric of a protest sign. These are two of the finest composers of our time, each with a Pulitzer Prize. But they are still figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis without making artistic missteps.And composers aren’t alone. The Philharmonic, too, had mixed success with its “Earth” concerts, which were both conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Wolfe’s work shared the billing with, for some reason, a seemingly unrehearsed account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Thursday’s program was an improvement, tracing a more considered path from the ocean to the desert.Representing the ocean was Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” brief movements that do double duty as poetic depictions of water, and as representations of the opera’s underlying drama. On Thursday, they were mainly illustrative of the renovated Geffen Hall’s acoustics, which in their bright dryness rewarded the lithe angularity of “Sunday Morning” but punished the violent muddle of “Storm.”Between the climactic ending of the “Interludes” and the monumentality of “Become Desert,” it was easy to overlook the small, Debussyan beauty of Toru Takemitsu’s “I Hear the Water Dreaming,” featuring the Philharmonic’s principal flute, Robert Langevin, as the soloist. He had a warm, lulling tone but played — like the concertmaster, Frank Huang, in the Sibelius last week — with the selfless stage presence of a section leader rather than an assertive star.“Become Desert” is the third installment of a trilogy that began with “Become River,” a 2010 chamber work of icy harmonic shards trickling into a flow that grows grander, and deeper, as if to lead directly into “Become Ocean” (2013), which won the Pulitzer. A masterpiece of scale and form, it immerses its listeners into a world that moves unpredictably in grand swells and ebbs. “Desert,” from 2018, continues in that enveloping vein, a musical equivalent of a camera placed on the ground to witness an expansive landscape as the day breaks and recedes, then returns — a glimpse into a repetitive yet ever-changing environment. The earth emerges, in all three, as awesome in every sense of the word.The Seattle Symphony, under Ludovic Morlot, has recorded the entire trilogy. In that account, you get a sense of Adams’s deference to his subject, rendered in stereoscopic clarity: textures that move like shadows; stretches of seeming stasis that evolve organically, demanding patience and distance to truly perceive; an unchanging pace of life marked in the score with a tempo of 45 beats per minute, described by Adams as “timeless.” At the opening, percussion instruments chime on every beat, but scattered, which with a haze of sustained harmonics dissolve any sense of a downbeat.But at Geffen Hall, van Zweden’s baton sliced through the air more quickly, shaving a few minutes from the score’s typical duration and dispelling its magic, and delicacy, along the way. Its 4/4 time signature all too apparent, the music was less immersive than propulsive.It was an unfortunate New York introduction to a work that ranks among Adams’s most ingeniously reverential. As written, the slowly evaporating final section recalls the poignant dissolving strings at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. On Thursday, though, it just felt like a march to a finish line painted intrusively on the earth.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: John Luther Adams’s ‘Vespers’ Pray for an Earth in Crisis

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      John Luther Adams’s latest premiere, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” is a tear-splattered departure from his usual style.Lately, the composer John Luther Adams has been thinking about art — and artists — in times of crisis.Amid war, a pandemic, political precarity and looming climate disaster, someone like him can retreat into nostalgia, or turn to an aesthetic of proselytism, or speak directly to current events as if following Brecht’s famous epigraph from his “Svendborg Poems,” “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”Adams sees himself as something of a modern Monet, painting his monumental water lilies during World War I. “Like Monet, in my own lesser way, the best thing I can do now, for myself and for other people,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is what I’ve done throughout my life: to follow my art, with an ever-deeper sense of urgency and devotion.”That sense has led him to his latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Friday, one night after its unveiling in Philadelphia. Rarely, if ever, has Adams written music that has been so explicitly felt, and more directly stated — but also so ineffective.In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).But the reading didn’t seem to suffer. Nally is an experienced hand in Adams’s music, having premiered and recorded his “Canticles of the Holy Wind” with the Crossing. And on Friday, he navigated with cool command the idiosyncratic layout of the “Vespers” — four choruses and four string-and-percussion ensembles arranged across the stage, with a piano and harp in the middle, then woodwinds, brass and additional instruments aloft in the balconies.Adams’s score calls for brasses and woodwinds to be perched in balconies on either side of the stage.Chris LeeIn the first section, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” percussive ringing and ghostly breaths give way to geological texts — the names and colors of rocks — describing two billion years’ worth of layers in the Grand Canyon. The words, set against suspended, seemingly static strings, come quickly, unintelligible as they blend and best taken in, as with most of Adams’s music, as if letting them wash over you.Insistently downward melodic phrases appear to echo section’s title until they emerge as the idée fixe of the entire piece, doleful and reflecting a world in decline. The gesture takes form next, in “A Weeping of Doves,” as wailing vocalise; and is subtler in “Night-Shining Clouds,” as the slowly sloping sheen of harmonics in the strings.The clearest allusion to the work’s liturgical title comes in the fourth section, “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” which is set to the scientific binomials of 193 species Adams describes in the score as “critically threatened and endangered.” (Why that includes the Kauai O’o, the long-extinct bird whose call inspired the fifth section, “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” is beyond me.)If the litany doesn’t quite land, it’s not Adams’s fault — though he does overlay the names to the point rendering them indistinguishable, with no time to register, much less grieve for them. The bigger difficulty, though, is that since 2020, a list like this has lost its power; people routinely saw unfathomably high infection rates, and the deaths of more than one million Americans. If that hasn’t been enough to inspire collective mourning, what chance could there have been for him?The last name among the “Litanies” is Homo sapiens — uncharacteristic for Adams, and more expected of a comparatively immature artist’s rhetoric. But there is a return to form in that “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” in which the strings are again suspended, though foundational, under Zhang’s elegant but sorrowful vocal line, which is revealed to be drawn-out adaptation of the Kauai O’o call.That bird song — captured in 1987, in a recording of the last of the species — does appear as a transcription at the end, played by a piccolo and orchestral bells perched in a balcony at the rear of the hall. The moment unfurls with freedom, its long rests patient, its repeated call beautiful and heartbreakingly lonely. It’s here, as Adams turns his ear and pen back toward nature, that his music is most powerful.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      John Luther Adams, Praying for the Earth in Music

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      First come the plants: the Baishan fir and the Qiaojia pine, the coral tree and the suicide palm. Then come the insects, the Franklin’s bumblebee and the Bozdagh grasshopper in turn, then the spiders, the fish, the reptiles, the amphibians, the frogs, 17 kinds in all. Birds fly behind, finches and macaws and vultures and larks, monarchs and thrushes and curlews and crows. Last are the mammals, from the mightiest Javan rhinoceros to the meekest mountain pygmy possum.The Latin binomials of 192 endangered species make up the incantatory text of “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” the grim, dark heart of “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” a new, 50-minute work by John Luther Adams that the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Crossing and the soprano Meigui Zhang will premiere under Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Philadelphia on Thursday, before taking it to Carnegie Hall on Friday.That’s 192 endangered species until low male voices invoke one more, the species that named the others and now threatens them, and itself, with extinction: Homo sapiens.“We’ve got to face that the situation is dire and it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Adams said of the climate crisis, and his latest musical response to it, in a recent video interview from his home in the New Mexico desert. “The only way it’s going to get better is if we face the harsh, stark, sobering, actually terrifying realities ahead of us — and act on them.”Coincidentally, though tellingly, the “Vespers” will have their premiere little more than a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its latest report that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”For Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the new “Vespers” are an example of the role that classical music can play in society.“We all believe that music can change the world,” Tarnopolsky said of the premiere’s creators, “that music can change the way we look at searing issues facing humanity. John Luther Adams’s music — his philosophy, his ethos — encapsulates that in all of his work.”Still, for all the ecological concern that has informed so much of what Adams has composed since he turned away from professional environmentalism several decades ago, he has rarely, if ever, been so direct as in these “Vespers.” Habitual disclaimers that his music and his activism were to some extent distinct used to surround works like “Become Ocean,” the consuming masterpiece that won him the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2014, and “Become Desert,” a New York Philharmonic co-commission that will have its belated Lincoln Center premiere this June.Following the example of Greta Thunberg, Adams took the train to Philadelphia from New Mexico, rather than fly.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics,” Adams wrote in “Silences So Deep,” an eloquent memoir published in 2020. “And yet I refuse to make political art.”But the “Vespers” are markedly more urgent in tone compared with Adams’s typical “passive activism,” as it was called by Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, which has recorded Adams works including “Canticles of the Holy Winds” and “Sila: The Breath of the World.”“He builds these sound worlds that allow you to appreciate the awesomeness, literally, of the world around us, even though you’re sitting in a concert hall that is probably contributing to the problem,” Nally said, pointing as an example to the first of the five vespers, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” which sinks through the layered rocks of the Grand Canyon, eons of geology evoking the permanence of the Earth.“Music for me is a kind of spiritual discipline; it’s as close to religion as I get,” Adams said. “It’s a way of being in touch with mysteries larger, deeper, older than I can fathom, and so, because of that, I’ve never really been interested in expressing myself in music.”That changed, he continued, as he worked on the Philadelphia commission from spring 2020 on, amid superstorms, floods, police killings and the pandemic. His best friend, the nature writer Barry Lopez, died of prostate cancer that December, three months after a wildfire had burned parts of his home near the McKenzie River in Oregon, making him a climate refugee.“In the middle of all this,” Adams recalled, “I found myself composing what is if not the most personal, at least the most overtly expressive music I’ve ever composed.”But the “Vespers” are prayers, not a requiem. Even if Adams said that this score is one of the saddest and most austere that he has composed, it still celebrates the splendor of the enduring Earth, and is more melodic than some of his music has been. “If ‘Ocean’ and ‘Desert’ are Brucknerian,” he suggested, “this is almost Mozartean.”That dynamic of beauty and grief going hand in hand is especially apparent in “Night Shining Clouds,” a movement for strings alone that depicts cloud structures whose chemistry means that they are “getting more beautiful because we’re polluting the Earth more,” Adams said. It’s also clear in “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” the desolate final movement, a setting for soprano of the unrequited mating call of the last Kauai oo, a bird native to Hawaii that has not been heard since the 1980s.“It’s the song of an extinct bird, and yet it’s so beautiful,” Adams said. “One of my friends looked at the score and said, ‘Well, you just can’t help yourself, can you J.L.A., you have to end on a hopeful note.’ I said, ‘Jim, the bird’s extinct.’”Adams has not lost hope yet, though he admits that “the odds don’t look good for us as a species, and regardless even the best-case scenario isn’t very rosy.” The Biden administration’s recent decision to approve further oil drilling in his beloved Alaska is “kind of unbelievable,” he said.What gives Adams succor, even now, is a younger group of activists coming to the fore and working in new ways. Following the example of Greta Thunberg, he has cut back on travel and become more deliberate about his choices when it is unavoidable. To attend the back-to-back premieres of “Vespers” and “Night” — his part in “Proximity,” the triptych that opened last week at Lyric Opera of Chicago — he took the train from Albuquerque, rather than fly.“It’s these next generations that are going to have to sort through the rubble that my generation is leaving to them,” Adams said, “and imagine new ways of living together with one another, and living within the limits of biology — or our goose is cooked. But I’m not betting against them, in the face of all of it.”What role does that leave for an old-time environmentalist, now 70, writing music as the catastrophe that he long worked to avoid gathers speed?Adams often talked with Lopez, he said, about what it meant to be a “senior artist.” They agreed that they were, and could be, nothing like the elders of the Indigenous communities they knew. But when Adams recently reread “Arctic Dreams,” which won Lopez the National Book Award in 1986, he found a passage that reminded him of another ideal they had discussed.“The Inuit have a particular kind of person, an isumataq,” Adams said. “An isumataq is not an elder; an isumataq is a person who creates the atmosphere, or the place, within which wisdom may reveal itself. I think Barry was absolutely an isumataq. And that’s what I’m looking for in my own work, and have been looking for all my life. It’s not because I think I know anything. I don’t. I’m probably more clueless than the next person. It’s precisely because I don’t know, that I do what I do.”“I’m not trying to save you, or anyone else, let alone the world,” Adams continued. “First and foremost, I’m doing this because I’m lost, and I’m looking for religion. I’m looking for God, in that sense.” More

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      Review: In Chicago, an Opera Triptych Reaches for Connection

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      Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Turns the Armory Into an Aviary

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      The ensemble Alarm Will Sound spread throughout the Park Avenue Armory’s drill hall for the installation-like music of John Luther Adams.By now, the Park Avenue Armory’s Recital Series concerts are a known quantity: art song and chamber music in ornate, intimate spaces.Whether the programming is classic or contemporary, the packaging is the same, with only a few surprises — as when the soprano Barbara Hannigan turned Erik Satie’s music into semi-staged monodrama. But there hasn’t been a performance quite like the one by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound on Thursday.Abandoning the traditional Recital Series rooms, the group’s members spread throughout the Armory’s capacious drill hall for John Luther Adams’s characterful and moving “Ten Thousand Birds,” an installation-like project that’s as much environmental — in presentation, but also in its preoccupations — as it is musical.Brandon Patrick George played flute and, here, piccolo.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAdams, our reigning musical ambassador of the natural world, hasn’t written a score here in the usual sense. It is an Audubon book in translation: each page, the portrait of a bird in sound. Together the sketches form an open-ended and modular folio, with minimal guidance. “The size of the ensemble and the duration of a performance may be tailored to the specific site and occasion,” Adams writes in a note for the published version. “It is not necessary to play all the pieces in this collection. It’s not even necessary to play all the musical material within a particular piece.”He also calls for “the largest possible physical space”; the drill hall is about 55,000 square feet, which Alarm Will Sound occupied with both freedom and precision in a staging by Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director, and the percussionist Peter Ferry, its assistant artistic director. (Early in the pandemic, Pierson and these players made a short video adaptation called “Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens”; imaginative and often funny, it remains a high point of a low moment in classical music.)At the Armory, Alarm Will Sound arranged “Ten Thousand Birds” into a roughly 70-minute experience that follows the cycle of the day: Beginning with a gentle breeze, it traces the awakening accumulation of morning, the liveliness of afternoon and the long pauses of night before returning to that peaceful wind. Overhead the lights gradually dimmed, and on the floor, the audience was invited to move among the musicians. Just as there is no one way to present this work, there are no rules for how to hear it.The horn player Laura Weiner among audience members, who were free to move among the musicians throughout the work.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOn Thursday, people weren’t entirely prepared for the piece to begin, with some preshow chatter lingering alongside the wind. But it’s difficult to miss a breathy bassoon being waved around, and audience members more clearly understood what was happening as other musicians took their places. A flute, hazy and lightly arpeggiated, introduced melody to the mix, which grew richer: percussion in the familiar falling interval of bird song in classical music, and harmonic runs in the strings.Adams has in the past evoked immense natural forces — such as in his “Become” trilogy, which includes the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning “Become Ocean” — and here he balances both abstraction and transcription. For every passage of lyricism that emerges from instrumental dialogue, there is a phrase with the uncanny exactitude of Messiaen: a piccolo call, an agitated piano flutter.And, as staged at the Armory, there was a subtle sense of drama. Zoomorphic in their movement, the players shifted throughout the space less like musicians and more like characters. A timpani rumble dispersed a small ensemble that had been crowded around it. Some performers were elusive or difficult to place, perched in the mezzanine or in the frame of a Juliet balcony but obscured by darkness. Strings zipped through listeners in a buzzing swarm. By the time the work reached its nocturnal scenes, though, that kind of levity gave way to serene patience — long silences punctuated by passing song.Some in the audience lay as if in meditation while others paced around the drill hall. Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAs in “Inuksuit,” another of Adams’s installation works, the audience’s engagement varied. Curiosity kept me in constant motion; some people stayed in chairs, or sat in groups on the ground like picnickers. A few lay flat, eyes closed, as if in meditation. David Byrne strolled with a bicycle helmet in hand, scrutinizing unattended percussion instruments. One man knitted, while another played Scrabble. Many — too many — pulled out their phones to take photos or record, their flashes distracting in the dark.Which is unfortunate because what “Ten Thousand Birds” offers, above all, is an opportunity to marvel, not document. If I were to attend again, I would be in the camp of those who rested in one place and let sounds come to them, the way they might during a day at the park. Regardless, focus is all it takes for this piece, and Alarm Will Sound’s thoughtful realization of it, to achieve its aim: a heightened aestheticization of nature, and perhaps a renewed connection with it.Whether Adams accomplishes something more with this work — whether its spirit of appreciation rises to the level of advocacy — is, like the experience of the music itself, up to the audience.Alarm Will SoundRepeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More