Adolphe Adam is famous for the popular ballets Giselle and Le Corsaire, with his stage works being highly influential in the development of 19th-century musical theatre, most especially in the evolution of the Romantic ballet. The colourful and innovative Griseldis, ou Les Cinq Sens narrates the adventures of Elfrid the Crown Prince of Bohemia, on a journey of discovery and growing self-awareness as he travels to meet his prospective bride, Griseldis, Princess of Moldova. Heard here in it's world premiere recording, Griseldis is one of Adam's most important ballets.

Adolphe Adam is best known today for the ballets Giselle and Le Corsaire, but his prolific output included 39 operas and several other ballet scores, including the vivacious tale of La Filleule des fées (‘The Fairies’ God-daughter’). The story takes place in an idealized countryside, revolving around the god-daughter Ysaure’s complex amorous affairs and the magical interventions of good and wicked fairies. With its brilliantly colorful orchestration, memorable themes and rhythmic momentum, this work is very much the equal of Giselle.

After increasing successes with ballets, melodramas and theatrical works, Adolphe Adam won widespread acclaim with Giselle (highlights can be heard on 8.572924). A year later he wrote La Jolie Fille de Gand, which was received just as enthusiastically by audiences and critics alike. This delightful ballet-pantomime with trademark thematic brilliance is set in Ghent and Venice, its plot one of abduction and romance. Adam’s score, which features the use of cornets and the tuba-like ophicleide, displays a more daring sense of color than that of Giselle.

A bold reinvention of a 19th-century classic. Kader Belarbi's fresh scenario and choreography give this colourful yet ultimately tragic story renewed clarity and simplicity. David Coleman conducts a score based on Adolphe Adam's original work, but enhanced with music by composers from Massenet to Sibelius, as well as new compositions and orchestrations by Coleman himself. This is a version for the modern age....'simply magnificent: A miracle in two acts.' - Le Figaro.

A bold reinvention of a 19th-century classic. Kader Belarbi's fresh scenario and choreography give this colourful yet ultimately tragic story renewed clarity and simplicity. David Coleman conducts a score based on Adolphe Adam's original work, but enhanced with music by composers from Massenet to Sibelius, as well as new compositions and orchestrations by Coleman himself. This is a version for the modern age....'simply magnificent: A miracle in two acts.' - Le Figaro.

Also available on Blu-ray

With its narrative of buccaneering bravado, exotic opulence, romance and traitorous intrigue, Le Corsaire is one of the most impressive narrative ballets of the 19th century, and it remains one of Adolphe Adam’s best-known works. Director of the Wiener Staatsballett, Manuel Legris, has choreographed a new version that draws on the rich performance traditions of Russia and France, and carefully combines spirited action, Adam’s delightful music, choreography, scenery and costumes into an elegant and impressive production which brings to life the colourful events that surround the leading couple of Conrad and Médora.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Lonjumeau was a great success at its premiere in 1836, and, along with the ballet Giselle, has remained one of the composer’s most popular works. Following the great French tradition, this opéra-comique has it all: 18th century Rococo Parisian glamour and a perilous love story involving the dashing and flirtatious Chapelou and his opposite, the powerful and clever Madeleine. This lavish and spectacular production from the Opéra Comique in Paris received widespread critical acclaim and also features costumes by the iconic French fashion designer Christian Lacroix.

Also available on Blu-ray

Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Lonjumeau was a great success at its premiere in 1836, and, along with the ballet Giselle, has remained one of the composer’s most popular works. Following the great French tradition, this opéra-comique has it all: 18th century Rococo Parisian glamour and a perilous love story involving the dashing and flirtatious Chapelou and his opposite, the powerful and clever Madeleine. This lavish and spectacular production from the Opéra Comique in Paris received widespread critical acclaim and also features costumes by the iconic French fashion designer Christian Lacroix.

Orfa was Adolphe Adam’s penultimate ballet, with an intriguing scenario based on Nordic mythology. It shares analogies with Hesiod’s Theogony and Wagner’s Ring cycle in depicting the struggle between the older gods (Loki) and younger gods (Odin). Full of archetypal Romantic elements, Orfa was mounted with the lavish stage spectacle for which the Paris Opéra was famous, and featured Fanny Cerrito in the title role. Adam’s writing shows increasingly vivid orchestral imagination, drama and tonal colour, with roles for several instrumental soloists. This world premiere recording uses a new edition copied from Adam’s original manuscript score held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments. The premieres of Ondrej Adámek's "Where are You?" and "Follow me" were distinctive for their excellent casts, featuring stars such as Magdalena Kožená, Isabelle Faust and Simon Rattle. In Adámek’s "Follow me", a three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra, the melodies are divided between the soloist and the orchestra along the lines of the late medieval hocket technique, whereby the composer seeks to connect a single individual with a (human) crowd. The first performance of Adámek’s "Where are You?" for mezzo-soprano and orchestra was an outstanding event in Munich's concert programme this year. In the eleven-part, approximately 35-minute-long kaleidoscope of sound, dominated by constant motoric movement – ranging from everyday sounds such as the monotonous ticking of a clock to the sweeping, electrifyingly rhythmic pounding of the orchestra tutti – the composer embarks on a search for the human ("Where do we come from and where are we going?") and the divine.

Review

This is music that grabs the listener by the ears and doesn’t let go. I found it completely exhilarating.

Nothing about either score included on this recording is remotely derivative or even predictable. If I were to say that it is as if Adámek had smashed up all previous music into tiny pieces and then reconstructed them into something marvellous and new, that might give the impression that he is some kind of arch post modernist. He is nothing of the sort. Almost miraculously he manages to be both uncompromisingly modernist and yet intensely communicative. Try his setting of what, in effect amounts to St Theresa’s ecstatic, religious orgasm in the seventh song of Where Are You? and what you’ll get is music that verges on the demented but which manages to be deeply spiritual and very sexy! Both scores are full of such wild, rude, exultant moments.

Follow Me is simultaneously a violin concerto and someone having a lot of fun with what a violin concerto might mean. I am not aware of another concerto that concludes with what amounts to a musical lynching of the soloist by the orchestra. One of the characteristics of Adámek’s writing is his absolute command of even the most outré material. Every note delivers an aural punch. He is of course capable of writing music of great delicacy, as in the concerto’s Bach derived slow movement but even here every note makes its point.

The opening movement features orchestral soloists echoing the opening phrases by the solo violin (the ‘follow me’ of the work’s title), phrases the composer explains in his joyous, quixotic note that were inspired by the exaggerated vibrato of a singer in Japanese Noh theatre. The orchestra, in a sense, gathers round the soloist, repeating her phrases. Isabelle Faust is at her imperious best here. This then subsides into silence before the soloist starts again with more seductive phrases. As Adámek puts it, these phrases provoke the orchestra “eventually driving them mad”. This builds and builds as the various motifs combine and recombine. The tension generated by the gradually gathering of tempo and volume is quite ferocious before Adámek pulls the rug from under the expected eruption and the movement ends with weird whistlings and scrapings out of which the slow movement evolves. A great strength of Adámek’s music is to unsettle the listener whilst keeping them on the edge of their seat.

One of the unifying techniques across all three movements of this concerto is what Adámek likens to a kind of musical ping pong where melodies are split, in alternate notes, between soloist and members of the orchestra. This effect plus an extreme elongation of material taken from Bach is most noticeable in this slow movement. It is a strange and mysterious movement that subsides into the uneasy calm from it emerged.

On a purely technical level, the finale combines all the elements of the previous two movements but that scarcely does justice to the effect it has on the listener. The shadowing of the soloist which gives the work its title is allowed finally to work its way from a hushed, fugitive opening all the way to the mighty climax that the opening movement was robbed of. As in that movement, the following of the soloist by the orchestra becomes more combative- a wry nod I think to the lion taming tradition of the 19^th century virtuoso concerto – and the music, dominated by a rogue trombone, constantly threatens to swamp the soloist whose final phrases are delivered off stage before a final thrilling orchestral stampede rounds things off. Is that a tongue in cheek reference to the final sacrificial dance of the Rite of Spring I hear in this final passage? What this description may not capture is that this is all immensely diverting and colossal fun. The world of Adámek’s music may be capable of great seriousness but it never takes itself too seriously.

Follow Me is, in many ways, the curtain raiser for the even more remarkable Where Are You? My earlier comments have probably already given some indication of what it is like. Written for mezzo soprano and orchestra, it is a song cycle on spiritual themes with texts from the Bible, the Gita and the autobiography of St Theresa. None of this is handled in a conventional manner. The opening section revels in the vowel sounds of the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. A later movement sets possible Czech translations of those Aramaic words. It’s that sort of piece! The theme that unites these disparate elements is the way in which the spiritual quest for the divine however how high it can raise us comes down to earth with the question ‘Where are you?’ left unanswered. It has to be said that the piece celebrates the quest as much as it illustrates its ultimate failure and it does so with affection and good humour as well as profundity and anguish.

The vocalist is required to adopt a huge range of singing styles from breaths and rolled r’s to folk singing to outrageous coloratura. As in most of his other scores that I’ve heard, Adámek can find music in almost anything and make no mistake – this is a musical event above all else. The composer isn’t advancing some obscure musicological idea but making maddening, frenzied, bewildering, exuberant music. Ultimately, like the spiritual quest it describes, words fail to do justice to this piece. You are just going to have to listen to it.

--MusicWeb International (David McDade)

Curious, open-minded, fascinated by other cultures, Ondrej Adámek assimilates every aesthetic whose path he crosses. His works reveal all these influences, stamping them with a very individual sound colour that, combined with a powerful rhythmic sense and solid formal solid architecture, creates highly personal music by no means exempt from dramaturgy. Adámek seeks out specific playing techniques for classical instruments and creates new and original instruments. Here the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under the direction of Daniel Kawka lays before us an eclectic panorama of his music, from the ritualised, even mechanised sinuosities of a lullaby to the disconcerting mechanism of the strange musical machines he invents, which he does not hesitate to place in front of the orchestra.

Adams County Banjo

Anna Geniushene and Lukas Geniusas both have brilliant careers as soloists: Anna won the silver medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 and now records for Fuga Libera, while Lukas' two Rachmaninov recordings, a recital of solo works (ALPHA997) and songs with Asmik Grigorian (ALPHA796), have both won major awards. Partners in life and in art, they form a highly virtuosic and tightly knit duo. This highly varied programme pays tribute to American music with works by Gershwin, Stravinsky, Copland and McPhee, a succession of melting-pots that create fusions of classical music, jazz, Mexican music and Balinese rhythms. The spectacular and rebellious Fourth Ballad from Frederic Rzewski's North American Ballads (1978-79) is also included. This musical odyssey concludes with the vast fresco that is John Adam's magnificent Hallelujah Junction (1996).

As part of his final year as Music Director and following a two-season celebration of the Orchestra’s 125th anniversary, Peter Oundjian and the RSNO here present their second recording of music by John Adams, with the exceptional participation of the Doric String Quartet. Written for a large orchestra including six percussionists, keyboard sampler, and amplified steel-string guitar, Naive and Sentimental Music is a sweepingly symphonic masterpiece, full of contrasts and clashes. It reflects the dichotomy between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poetry as analyzed by Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, as well as the ‘bipolar’ musical life of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dedicatee of this piece, who conducted the first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999. Absolute Jest is a large-scale scherzo for amplified string quartet and orchestra, heavily inspired by the music of Beethoven, which Adams has always deeply admired. The quartet of soloists, a late addition to the score, emphasises the echoes of Beethoven’s music (mainly his string quartets) and facilitates a ‘hyperspace rate’ of virtuosity, which the Doric String Quartet here perfectly demonstrates.

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The RSNO’s playing captures all the delicacy, grandeur and zing of Adams’s complex score, while the Doric String Quartet brings sumptuous sweetness and laser-like clarity to its solo part. There follows a magnificent reading of Naïve and Sentimental Music, with Oundjian skilfully managing the balance of pace and introspection.

– BBC Music Magazine

As Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams puts it, his latest work An Atlas of Deep Time "... is grounded in my desire, amid the turbulence of human affairs, to hear the older, deeper resonances of the earth." Commissioned and recorded with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Delta David Gier, the piece taps into an ancient resonance that seems to hover imposingly, but benevolently, over our own existence -�itself a blip in geological time. "You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand," said the late author Barry Lopez, a lifelong friend and mentor to Adams. His words serve as the written invocation to a work that beautifully captures the sense of majesty, mystery and vulnerability that we, and the natural world, hold within us.

Arctic Dreams is critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams's uniquely beautiful and magical seven-movement work for a quartet of voices and a quartet of strings, with layers of digital delay that create 32-part canonic textures. It is dedicated to the composers friend the late writer Barry Lopez, and titled after one of Lopez's greatest books. The work, like most of Adamss works, reflects the composers passion for natures elemental forces. Adams writes about the piece: As in several of my later string quartets, all the string sounds are produced by natural harmonics and open strings. The sung text is composed of the names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and the seasons, in the languages of the Iñupiat and Gwichin peoples of Alaska. John Luther Adams's music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released eight recordings devoted to his work, including Lines Made by Walking, Everything That Rises, and The Wind in High Places. The performers: Synergy Vocals is a critically acclaimed vocal ensemble that has recorded music by Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Luciano Berio, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and many others and performed with the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. Their performances and recordings have been deemed amazing (New York Times); beautiful, haunting (Gramophone); and dazzling (The Observer). With Synergy is a quartet of notable string players: violinist Robin Lorentz, violist Ron Lawrence, cellist Michael Finckel, and bassist Robert Black.

John Adams’ City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with the composer himself calling it ‘an imaginary film score’, while Fearful Symmetries exemplifies his steamroller motor rhythms. The album ends with a capricious ‘Spider Dance’ of memorable rhythmic drive – a work dedicated to Marin Alsop who leads the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in these performances.

REVIEWS:

Marin Alsop has been quietly championing John Adams abroad—and now at the Met Opera conducting his El Nino— for decades. A new Naxos recording with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra demonstrates her flair and feeling for his distinctive idiom. City Noir, premiered by the LA Phil in 2009, is a vivid, multi-textured score inspired by mid-20th century urban California. With its jazz inflections and brooding canvases, the debt to the City of Angels and film noir are equally clear. This is the work’s third recording but well worth acquiring for Alsop’s theatrical bite and detailed interpretation. Punchier than Robertson and livelier than Dudamel (though Robertson’s ravishing sonics make for essential listening), she holds the attention with a sure eye for the work’s architectural twists and turns. The companion piece is Fearful Symmetries from 1988, one of Adams’s most infectious scores and yet only receiving its second outing on disc. Alsop takes the chugging basic pulse a tad faster than the composer’s own recording without sacrificing any of the infinite variety to be found in Adams’s orchestral details. It’s a joyous, carefree work and beautifully recorded. The same goes for the recorded premiere of Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance. Happily rehabilitated after getting the chop from Girls of the Golden West, this six-minute essay in wriggling cross rhythms is laced with sardonic wit.

-- Musical America (Clive Paget)

John Adams’s City Noir has been pretty well represented on disc in the fifteen years since its 2009 premiere: Marin Alsop’s new recording of the score with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony is the work’s fourth. In general, this celebration of the city of Los Angeles benefits from her approach. It’s swift and characterful...its structure emerges nicely intact in Alsop’s hands. The central “The Song is for You” boasts a series of idiomatic solos (especially from alto saxophone and trombone), at times seeming to channel Gershwin. [The] ORF’s woodwinds, trumpets, and jazz drummer really shine here. By about any measure, this is some brash and chill Adams.

Even more welcome is the pairing’s account of Fearful Symmetries, a half-hour-long study in rhythm and texture that’s only been recorded once before. Granted, that earlier release was led by the composer and it’s aged well. But Alsop’s new take is downright invigorating. The conductor brings a strong sense of drive to the music, drawing out a beautiful blend of colors – from invitingly swooning saxophone quartet playing to unexpected synthesizer colors – from her forces. What’s more, hers is a reading that manages to vigorously illuminate the sophistication of Adams’s compositional language, circa 1988. It’s a keeper.

-- The Arts Fuse

“Darkness and Scattered Light” presents celebrated Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams’s mesmerizing; elegant; virtuosic music for double bass—two solos and a work for five basses—written for and all performed by bassist extraordinaire Robert Black. “This is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard in years.... It would be hard to imagine a better match of composer and performer than John Luther Adams and Robert Black.”(David Lang; Pulitzer-winning composer); John Luther Adams’s music has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic; the Chicago Symphony; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Seattle Symphony; the and the JACK?Quartet. Cold Blue Music has released ten recordings of his work; including Houses of the Wind; Arctic Dreams; Lines Made by Walking; Everything That Rises; and The Wind in High Places. “John Luther Adams ... one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” (Alex Ross; The New Yorker) “His music . . . is an elemental experience.” (The Guardian). Robert Black tours the world collaborating with composers; musicians; and other artists. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars; his recent collaborations have been with Philip Glass; Eve Beglarian; and Joan Tower. “No one on the planet can make the double bass sing; dance; sound like a drum; spin like a top; like Robert Black. Robert has single-handedly reinvented the technique and repertoire of the Double Bass; bringing it bursting into the 21st century.” (Michael Gordon)

Also available on Blu-ray



ADAMS Doctor Atomic & • Lawrence Renes, cond; Gerald Finley ( Oppenheimer ); Jessica Rivera ( Kitty ); Eric Owens ( General Groves ); Richard Paul Fink ( Teller ); James Maddalena ( Hubbard ); Thomas Glenn ( Wilson ); Ellen Rabiner ( Pasqualita ); Netherlands PO & Op Ch • BBC/OPUS ARTE 998 (2 DVDs: 168:09)


& Illustrated synopsis; documentaries on opera, cast, composer, and director; interview with director


John Adams has already analyzed Nixon as he visited China and scrutinized terrorists and cruise ship passengers in extremis. Now, Doctor Atomic focuses on the final days of the Manhattan Project as J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues struggle to produce the first atomic bomb. The moral dilemmas presented by that weapon drive the conflict, but though the effects of its future use are made starkly obvious and are central to the purpose of the creators, no conclusion is imposed. Rather, Doctor Atomic is an exploration of the extraordinarily gifted people who, for the cause of good, created a diabolical device that irrevocably changed them and the world that summer of 1945.


Long-time Adams collaborator Peter Sellars fashioned the libretto. Using historical sources throughout, he gives the work a strongly documentary flavor, allowing the viewer to piece together the events, personalities, and conflicts. However, it is Sellars’s use of poetry that is the most striking. Oppenheimer makes love to his wife Kitty with Baudelaire’s sensual verse, and quotes him again as the final countdown stretches time agonizingly. Kitty voices Muriel Rukeyser’s vision of peace in a world facing inescapable death. Pasqualita sings evocative Native American verse as a lullaby; and the atomic blast is anticipated with quotes from the Bhagavad Gita . In the finale to act I—a stunning piece of theater—Oppenheimer cries out his personal agony in the words of John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart,” as the enemy, the “Gadget,” hangs shrouded Ark-like behind him. That many of these poems and poets were significant to Oppenheimer—the Donne sonnet inspired the project’s code name “Trinity,” and he learned Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gita —adds yet another layer to this strikingly profound work.


The role of the intense and driven Oppenheimer was created by Gerald Finley, a singer who inhabits every part with his superb acting and his tightly focused, richly expressive baritone. Other excellent artists from the San Francisco Opera premiere include sonorous bass Richard Paul Fink, a Mephistophelian Edward Teller, cynical and provocative; lyric tenor Thomas Glenn, whose sensitively performed Robert Wilson is uneasy but likeable; baritone Eric Owens, a physically and vocally imposing General Leslie Groves, the no-nonsense military commander of the project; and baritone James Maddalena—Nixon in Adams’s earlier opera—a long-suffering meteorologist Jack Hubbard. New to this production are mezzo-soprano Jessica Rivera and contralto Ellen Rabiner. Rivera’s Cassandra-like Kitty Oppenheimer, the conscience of the work, is vocally vivid, though some of the acting seems posed. Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa Indian housekeeper, is the only fictional character. Rabiner sings her role with a rich, if not always steady, voice, balancing Kitty’s intensity with quiet compassion. The fine Netherlands Opera Chorus, playing scientists and project personnel, serves as Greek chorus, intoning the opening scientific credo, chanting the targets, crying out in fright at the vision of Vishnu and staring into the blast in stunned silence at the culminating moment.


Edgard Varèse and 1950s science-fiction movie scores are John Adams’s acknowledged inspirations, and the combination is winning. The ostinatos of traditional minimalism are used sparingly and are often disjointed and irregular, creating an undercurrent of disequilibrium. More often, Adams employs extended chords, late Romantic in their chromatic richness, punctuated with bells, shrieks of brass, snatches of melody, and electronic roars and rumbles. Above this, Adams’s lyrical vocal lines wheel, often fraught with tension. This compelling score is by far the richest and most complex Adams has created.


Not all is perfect. Well as it recreates the anxiety of the night of the test, with its portentous storm, the second act occasionally makes repetitious dramatic points and is in need of some tightening. More troubling, there are a number of visual distractions, especially the rather silly choreography, expressing heaven knows what, and the frenzied video editing with its constant cutting, panning, and zooming, and continual, often shaky, tight close-ups. The editing seems to highlight the mechanics of vocal production as much as the acting and often leaves one with no sense of what is happening on the stage as a whole. Peter Sellars was both stage and video director, so I have to assume these were important parts of his conception. There is much to admire in that vision, but sometimes less is more.


By this time, many interested readers will either have seen the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of this work in the movie theater or heard it on the radio. Despite the similarities in casting and the typically small audience for modern operas, I hope it appears on DVD. This powerful opera deserves the documentation of both directorial visions. This Netherlands Opera production, in any case, should not be overlooked. It presents Sellars’s original concept, more abstract than the Met’s, well sung, conducted, and played, and with several fine performances not reprised in the Met production. Give it a try.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames
CAST:
J. Robert Oppenheimer – Gerald Finley
Kitty Oppenheimer – Jessica Rivera
General Leslie Groves – Eric Owens
Edward Teller – Richard Paul Fink
Jack Hubbard – James Maddalena
Robert Wilson – Thomas Glenn
Captain James Nolan – Jay Hunter Morris
Pasqualita – Ellen Rabiner

Bonus:
- Interview with Peter Sellars
- Illustrated synopsis and cast gallery

Picture format: NTSC 16:9 anamorphic
Sound format: Dolby Digital 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (All Regions)
Menu language: English
Subtitles: English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch
Running time: 228 mins
Number of DVDs: 2

Girls of the Golden West is a California opera, telling the story of the Gold Rush not through familiar time-worn myth, but in the words and deeds of real people: in the words of Mark Twain, "the strangest population, the finest population... who ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. "Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars drew from original sources from the Gold Rush era-letters, journals, newspaper articles, and familiar song lyrics-to create the libretto. The composer leads the LA Phil in this recording made in Disney Hall. The aria "Wagon Ride," which features Dav�ne Tines and Julia Bullock (both also Nonesuch artists), is available today. The Los Angeles Times called the opera "glorious and compelling. " After it's San Francisco premiere in 2017 and a production at the Netherlands Opera, Adams revised the opera significantly. Writing about this new, dramatically more compact, version, Mark Swed wrote in the Times, "The Disney concert performance... went straight for the gut. "Girls of the Golden Westfeatures the Los Angeles Master Chorale, long familiar with Adams' choral music, prepared by it's Artistic Director Grant Gershon, and a cast that also includes Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny. Adams says, "Girls of the Golden Westmay be my most personal of all my stage creations. Like the characters in it's story, I too am a kind of California immigrant... For forty years I have hiked those same mountains... And I share the same sense of awe and appreciation that Dame Shirley so perfectly evokes in the opera's very last moment-for the fathomless splendor and 'never-enough-to-be-talked-about sky of California.

J. L. ADAMS Inuksuit & • Thad Anderson, Noam Bierstone, Omar Camenartes, Michael Compitello, Nathan Davis, Christopher Demetriou, Rob Esler, Matt Evans, Diego Espinosa, Tim Feeney, Benjamin Fraley, Amy Garapic, Russell Greenberg, Nathaniel Hartman, Phil Hermans, Ayano Kataoka, Kelli Kathman, Danny Lichtenfeld, Ryan Maguire, Shard Mamoun, Krystina Marcoux, Murray Mast, Annie Laurie Mauhs-Pugh, Carson Moody, Benjamin Reimer, Jessica Schmitz, Jeff Stern, Bill Solomon, Christopher Swist, Lisa Tolentino, Alessandro Valiante, Owen Weaver (perc) • CANTALOUPE 21096 (CD: 59: 54, DVD 1:23:00)


& Strange and Sacred Noise video directed by Len Kamerling


This is an event. Inuksuit was written in 2009, and has become John Luther Adams’s signature piece. It is designed to be performed in an open, outdoor space, with a range of performers from nine to 99 (this recording uses 32). It is loose in its construction, with a flow of events that is similar from one performance to another, but whose details and ensemble will vary, depending on choices made in performance, and the characteristics of the environment chosen. Its title comes from the abstract stone structures made across Alaska by the Inuit over the centuries. It uses mostly unpitched percussion (or more precisely instruments of relative pitch) such as drums, cymbals, and gongs, but it also uses harmonic “whirly tubes,” conches, sirens, and glockenspiels and piccolos near the end. But Adams’s primary focus on less pitched, more “noisy” sound sources is a savvy one, as it allows great density and complexity of texture without all the additional harmonic complications that would result from using traditional orchestral instruments (for the record, lessons he’s learned from Inuksuit are being applied in a new work for outdoor wind ensembles).


I heard the piece a couple of years ago in New York at the Park Avenue Armory, a performance whose very venue of course contradicted the original premises of the piece, but was nonetheless magnificently executed. But this recording, made in the forest abutting Vermont’s Guilford Sound, captures better the sense of how the piece interacts with the natural environment (especially its birds, who seem quite unintimidated by all the racket). It also gives us a sense of the space that the piece creates and occupies.


The aspect of the work that impresses me the most is its pacing. Sounds are given their natural time to assert themselves before they are overlapped with others that naturally grow from the earlier ones’ timbres and envelopes. Thus “whirly tubes” eventually transform to conches, and are interrupted by drums whose seemingly random attacks become increasingly dense and patterned, which are joined by cymbals and then gongs, with sirens emerging out of the shimmering soup of upper partials, while the drums grow higher in register and more patterned … until it all crests like a tsunami and we are left with the twittering of birds, both musical and real.


The piece lasts roughly an hour (though the literature on it suggests a longer span, c.75–90 minutes), but with each repeat listening I never find it long. Rather, it is like the weather; one sees a storm front approaching and is mesmerized by the growing darkness, the rising wind, the smell of coming rain. It’s a tribute to Adams’s instinctive feel for the natural that he can pull this off; that it feels so open and spacious, and resists judgment.


The headnote may be a little confusing, but this release is the sort of hybrid to which we’re becoming more used today, and yet it also is presented a little confusingly. There is a standard CD of the piece. But there is also a DVD, which includes 1) the same recording, but with multi-track surround sound ( as well as straight DVD stereo) and a video of a different piece, Strange and Sacred Noise (1997). This work is a sort of prelude to Inuksuit , for percussion quartet in several different monotimbral scorings, and using many of the same process-driven techniques (you can read my review of the Mode 53 release in Fanfare 29:5). It’s led by the amazing Steven Schick, and Adams provides succinct commentaries between each of the eight movements. I particularly love the long third one, inspired by the overlapping accelerandos and decelerandos of Nancarrow and Adams’s contemporary Peter Garland. The performance is filmed in the Alaskan tundra, and is stark and dramatic in the juxtaposition of the players with the vast landscape.


I can’t fully review the surround-sound version because I do not have that configuration. But I can certainly testify that the DVD recording is more detailed, and has more presence and depth. (You also get about a dozen nice slides of the stone sentinels and the Alaskan landscape, that cycle endlessly through the piece.) But the CD sound is just dandy as well.


OK, I must briefly carp: While the piece is divided into five tracks for access-convenience (in both audio versions), Cantaloupe nowhere tells you the timings (even on the page for the disc on their web page). It also takes a bit to realize that the video on the DVD is under “extras.” It would have been nice if the contents had been presented just a little less elliptically. This is a minor kvetch; it’s just a little irritating in what feels to me like the label’s slightly cavalier attitude toward the listener.


But I don’t want this to color my overall enthusiasm for this release. This is a visionary work, in the tradition of Ives, Cage, Harrison, and Tenney—all acknowledged ancestor-mentors of the composer. Adams is deeply tuned into the eco-sensibility of the era in a humane, unpretentious, yet grand way. Indeed, I could express it more simply by saying that his art is grand but not grandiose. Want List for the coming year.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

Percussionist Steve Schick [an origianl member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars] releases his first full-length CD on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with his first book - which promises to be the definitive volume about percussion in the 20th-21st Century. A former percussionist himself, John Luther Adams finds music from the earth and brings it to life in composition - expect an unadulterated ambient soundscape that takes a journey through different sonic textures and environments, aided by a beautiful production and Schick's breathtaking performance.

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Orchestral Performance!

Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning composer John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge.” Harmonielehre was a deliberate move by Adams to expand his musical language beyond Minimalism, keeping its energetic pulse but embracing the rich tonal resources of the past to create a work that has accrued an aura of timelessness. Six-time GRAMMY Award-winning conductor Giancarlo Guerrerois music director of the Nashville Symphony and the NFM Wroc?aw Philharmonic in Poland, as well as principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. He has championed contemporary American music through numerous commissions, recordings and performances with the Nashville Symphony, presenting eleven world premieres of works by Michael Daugherty, Terry Riley, and others. As part of this commitment, he helped guide the creation of Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab & Workshop initiative.

 

REVIEWS:

 

In point of fact, John Adams’ father did not know Charles Ives, but imagined that they had a good deal in common, and that was a springboard to a work that is unlike any other among Adams’ output. It’s not at all clear why My Father Knew Charles Ives has been so neglected. The work gets a detailed, sympathetic treatment here from Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Guerrero and the Nashvillians have done a major service by reviving My Father Knew Charles Ives.

 

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

 

Given the difference in ambiance and style between the two works, these brilliantly played and recorded performances might just make an ideal point of entry for those new to the composer.

 

 

– MusicWeb International

"She leads the score with grand sweep and understanding, and her Colorado forces bring out its colors vividly; moreover, she inspires her cast to sing as if they're having a great time with this no-longer-new but still odd opera."


Nonesuch's 1987 recording of this opera, produced when the work was new, was revelatory. Though clearly a piece of mimimalism, it did not rely only on endless repetition; indeed, Adams' musical language was varied enough to make Nixon in China a fascinating opera despite very little action and a somewhat unrevealing text by Alice Goodman. The Nixons and the events of the 1972 visit came across as oddly shallow. It's clear now that that was the point: Nixon's first-act rant, "News has a kind of mystery", is much the key to the opera.

It also seems wittier and more purposefully ironic now, with Kissinger's villainy almost overshadowed by his ladykilling; Pat Nixon's innocence almost charming (we've seen worse since); Madame Mao's berserk aria even more pointedly wacky and funny; and the contrast between Chou En-lai's philosophizing and Richard Nixon's simplemindedness clearer than ever. During the toasts in the third scene of the first act, Chou's toast, an eloquent paean to the future ("Our children race downhill unflustered into peace..."), is accompanied by even arpeggios; when Nixon's clichés take over ("a vote of thanks to one and all who made this possible"), we're jarred into paying attention to his mundanity by disconnected, disparate tones. It's masterly.

Each scene in the first act still strikes me as a few minutes too long, but Act 2, particularly with the spectacular and varied music for the surreal opera performance, is riveting. The frustrating last act is oblique in its dramatic thrust (it features personal reflections from all of the characters except, tellingly, Kissinger), but it is food for thought even if it is a dramatic anti-climax. It's a strange, quiet way to end an opera--but take it for what it is.

This new recording, taken from a live performance at Denver's Ellie Caulkins Opera House in June, 2008, is brilliant. It is sonically way ahead of the Nonesuch (which was recorded at a very low level), thus making it possible to understand almost every word, and Marin Alsop's tempos are slightly slower than Edo de Waart's, which also helps comprehension. She leads the score with grand sweep and understanding, and her Colorado forces bring out its colors vividly; moreover, she inspires her cast to sing as if they're having a great time with this no-longer-new but still odd opera.

Robert Orth's Nixon has just the right amount of self-parody that "playing" Nixon requires--the distance between 1987 and now is very long and we can sense ironies from our vantage point that we were blind to then. Maria Kanyova's Pat also seems more sympathetic while remaining as publicly simple as she always was, and Kanyova's voice and diction are splendid. Marc Heller handles Mao's high tessitura, sometimes bordering on madness, with great character and flavor. Chen-Ye Yuan's Chou is beautifully sung and he captures both the character's joylessness and intelligence. Thomas Hammons (also on the Nonesuch recording) uses his dark, growling bass to show us everything we need to know about the cynical Kissinger, and Tracy Dahl, as Madame Mao, is pretty frightening, even while delivering her Queen of the Night-like aria.

There's not much to decide between this set and the Nonesuch, which is still available. As mentioned, this new one is sonically superior (and cheaper), but otherwise it's pretty much a tie. Naxos, like Nonesuch, supplies a libretto; Nonesuch's booklet has superb essays and a better synopsis.

--Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com (10/10!)

This recording presents one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of john Adams to emerge, well, in a long while.

In this program, Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich celebrate a composer of our time with works from different periods and citing a wide range of references, whether autobiographical or typically American. John Adams has assimilated numerous musical influences, and his personal style cannot be reduced to one of them: he is neither Minimalist, nor post-Minimalist, nor neo-Romantic. Some of his works can of course be said to belong to one or other of these movements, but he does not consider himself to be the representative of any particular tendency. If he refers to musical tradition in his works, it is always in a critical way and at the same time open to the influences of pop music, rock, and jazz.

REVIEW:

Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich mightn’t be the first pairing one associates with the music of John Adams. But, as their new album – simply titled John Adams – attests, they’ve pretty much got the iconic American composer’s style down pat.

Rhythmically, the Swiss band really digs into the proceedings here. That’s especially true of their account of Lollapalooza, a whimsical 1995 curtain-raiser dedicated to Simon Rattle. Järvi’s tempo is notably slower than either Kent Nagano’s or Michael Tilson Thomas’s, yet, if the reading is less overtly edgy, it’s perhaps jazzier than its forebears. And it certainly doesn’t want for energy or textural clarity.

Similar qualities mark Slonimsky’s Earbox, another mid-‘90s effort. It’s brilliantly energetic, yes, but Järvi’s command of its structure is the real story: this is as coherent a Slonimsky as has been played, clearly drawing on all the threads of Adams’ style up to about 1996 while also suggesting what was to come in pieces like Naïve and Sentimental Music and Son of Chamber Symphony.

Also, My Father Knew Charles Ives, Adams’ semi-autobiographical 2003 tone poem that, last year, was the highlight of a disc from the Nashville Symphony. Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester are, generally, a bit more relaxed in their tempos than their counterparts in Tennessee, especially in the first movement. But the performance never slogs; rather, it overflows with atmosphere and color.

Rounding things out is a carefully-balanced account of Adams’ 1986 fanfare Tromba lontana. Perhaps less familiar than its more vigorous companion piece, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Tromba lontana, with its delicately dancing textures, potently complements My Father Knew Charles Ives.

The end result is one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of Adams to emerge, well, in a long while. As such, it’s an excellent way to mark the composer’s 75th birthday this year – or just his general contributions to contemporary music, which, as this disc reminds, have been anything but commonplace or predictable.

-- The Arts Fuse (Jonathan Blumhofer)

A half-speed mastered, new LP transfer of a best-selling album in the acclaimed series of minimalist piano music recorded by Jeroen van Veen for Brilliant Classics.
‘Throughout, the playing’s brilliant, confident, and sonorous’: this album of the piano output of John Adams won glowing reviews when it was first released in 2017. As an indefatigable champion of minimalist music from both sides of the Atlantic, Jeroen van Veen had recorded some of these pieces before, within his compendious ‘Minimal Piano Collection’ which became an essential acquisition for collectors of the most influential classical style in music during the last 60 years.

The 2017 remake of China Gates is even more opulent as a performance, superbly engineered to catch van Veen’s subtleties of touch at the piano, and thus eminently suitable for a high-spec vinyl transfer. ‘There’s something quite nice about encountering interpretations of these perennial Adams favourites that sound so comfortable,’ continued the Arts Fuse review: ‘a pianist enjoying himself, freely exploring the enveloping diatonicism of the music.’

Adams regards Phrygian Gates (1977) as his ‘first mature composition’, and it may seem strange that he has not since written more for solo piano than the four pieces gathered here, but as Jeroen van Veen argues in his sleeve-note essay, these pieces between them say all that needs to be said in terms of the composer’s piano style.
Mostly composed in a West Coast beach hut, the gentle flow, rolling swells and thundering breakers of Phrygian Gates add up to a half-hour, overpowering analogy for melodic waves. From the same year, China Gates distils this energy into a five-minute work of memorably concentrated stillness. Adams left off the piano for another 20 years until writing Hallelujah Junction for two pianos in 1996. Van Veen gave the Dutch premiere, and he remains an outstanding, authoritative advocate of Adams’s music.

"Waves and Particles" is Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams’s beautifully shimmery, virtuosic string quartet, performed by the incredible, illustrious JACK Quartet. Adams’s music has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. JACK Quartet has been deemed “superheroes of the new music world” (Boston Globe) and “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity” (The Washington Post).

With Adaptations, The Firebirds - Banke, Filipsen & Pasborg, a critically acclaimed Danish trio, carve out a musical realm where genres intertwine and strict fidelity takes on a fluid form. Departing from convention, the trio ignites a sequence of improvisations that evolve into fresh string quartets, composed by a variety of contemporary classical composers and performed by the Nordic String Quartet, ultimately morphing into new arrangements, creating an ever-changing musical landscape.

Abate Berihun & The Addis Ken Project's Addis Ken (New Day) is a deeply evocative journey where jazz becomes both vessel and invocation. Drawing from Ethiopian Jewish liturgical traditions, pan-African rhythms, and modern improvisational language, they fuse ancient memory with contemporary expression in music that feels timeless and urgent all at once. Berihun's commanding tenor and soprano saxophones are matched by his remarkable vocal presence-earthy, elastic, and prayerful-capable of moving seamlessly from guttural incantation to soaring, skyward cries. Joined by pianist Roy Mor, bassist David Michaeli, and drummer/percussionist Nitzan Birnbaum, the quartet operates with intuitive empathy, shaping grooves and atmospheres that breathe and expand around Berihun's impassioned lead. Moments such as the stirring "Behatitu Kadush Kadush," featuring vocalist Rudi Bainesay, reach directly into sacred terrain, while pieces like "Addis Ken" and "Jerusalem" balance reverence with forward momentum. Rich in texture, spirit, and blues-rooted intensity, Addis Ken is music as lived experience-honoring lineage while speaking vividly in the present tense. "They are a joy to behold." Jerusalem Post. "The quartet of brilliant musicians drew inspiration not only from across the planet but also from the depths of time." - Tom�š S. Pol�vka (Prague)

2021 release. "The album's title Adela comes from a song by Rodrigo which constitutes the emotional culmination of our duo's programme. What counts is not the name, but the person we love and long for. Everyone certainly has such a person, and so we hope that each listener will find on our CD something close to his or her heart. The piano and classical guitar virtually never collaborate in music. However, after our first joint performance with Lukasz Kuropaczewski we immediately realised that we could create intriguing music worlds together. We followed the same line of thinking in our choice of programme, which derives from both the piano and guitar repertoires, though the spirit of the South that influences most of that music is more typically associated with the guitar tradition. In my arrangements of classical works, I strove to represent the sonic qualities of both instruments, their unique expression, and cultural associations. I reworked Domenico Scarlatti's famous "Sonata in D Minor (Toccata)" K. 141 so as to bring out it's Spanish roots. Titled "Domingo" on our album, it features distinctive flamenco qualities and an improvised layer. The "Aranjuez Concerto BWV 1056" is, as it's very name suggests, a fusion of the world's most famous piece for guitar and orchestra, Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez", with Johann Sebastian Bach's "Keyboard Concerto in F Minor" BWV 1056. Themes from the second, slow movements of both concertos interlink here as in the film cross-cutting technique, and we swap roles, Lukasz leading the Bach theme while I take up Rodrigo's."