Contents of Blu-ray Discs

High Definition Concert Recordings: Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, City Noir, Lollapalooza, Scheherazade.2, The Wound-Dresser, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary.
Bonus: John Adams in Conversation with Sarah Willis and John Adams in Conversation with Peter Sellars
Documentary: A Portrait of John Adams as the Berliner Philharmoniker's "Composer in Residence"
John Adams is considered the musical voice of America. His tonal language is at once unmistakable and of infinite variety. Minimalism mixes with imaginative orchestration and a jazz-inflected spirit to create a cosmos full of energy and colour that constantly reveals new facets. In a unique transatlantic partnership, John Adams has accompanied the Berliner Philharmoniker for a whole season as composer in residence. The orchestra performed a wide variety of his works, from the oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” and the famous “Harmonielehre” to more unfamiliar treasures. The concerts were conducted by chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle and outstanding guests: Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert and Kirill Petrenko. In the course of this partnership, John Adams himself also made his debut as conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

This 9-movement work by this Alaskan composer features Percussion Group Cincinnati, a quartet who commissioned and premiered the piece. The musicians are spatially separated so that waves of percussion crisscross around the room often to a hallucinatory effect.

Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams—it is my prediction that, 50 years from now, it will be the last composer’s music that is played most frequently. I am not sure that Adams is the “best” composer of the three (frankly, Reich’s work is more interesting to me), but he is the one who has motivated the most performers to program and record his work. For example, apart from Alsop, three other conductors have recorded Short Ride (de Waart on Nonesuch, Rattle on EMI, and Mosko on Chandos), and there are alternative recordings on Nonesuch of the other three works as well. The Nonesuch discs are important documents, but not necessarily the last word. Despite their explicit or implicit approval by the composer, they can and will be bettered, as time goes on. Consider The Wound-Dresser. I remember being impressed by this work when Nonesuch released the CD with baritone Sanford Sylvan, and the composer conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s—I still was in graduate school, and various commentators were quick to draw parallels between Walt Whitman’s injured and dying boys and the current victims of the AIDS epidemic. There’s nothing wrong with Sylvan and Adams, but I find Gunn and Alsop more moving—almost too much so, as the text’s homoaffective subtext is moved closer to the foreground. (It strikes me now that the vocal line at “Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested” could have been written by Stephen Sondheim.)

Alsop makes a good case for Short Ride and for the Berceuse élégiaque. The latter work is an arrangement for chamber orchestra of a work by Ferrucio Busoni—a fact that is not mentioned anywhere in Naxos’s documentation, shamefully enough. Adams, in his Nonesuch recording, is a little more weird and abrasive than Alsop in Shaker Loops—to good effect. All in all, the availability of the Nonesuch recordings does not make this Naxos release superfluous. Alsop is a fine conductor, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra plays well for her, and then there’s that Naxos price! If you’ve been curious about Adams’s music, but have not been willing to pay Nonesuch prices to hear it, here are four of Adams’s best works in competitive performances at a fraction of the cost.

Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE

Because John Adams' small yet substantial solo and duo piano output, succinctly described by my colleague Victor Carr Jr, has been so well served on disc, each new release necessarily becomes more vulnerable to comparison. Fortunately, pianist Ralph van Raat displays an innate affinity for the composer's idioms, be it China Gates' lyric beauty, Phrygian Gates' stamina-testing epic sprawl, or American Berserk's thorny, Ives-inspired ragtime allusions. Next to Gloria Cheng's chamber-like refinement and Emanuele Arciuli's extraordinary variety of color and touch, van Raat treats Phrygian Gates as an out-and-out virtuoso vehicle, with plenty of paragraphic sweep and brawny, roof-raising climaxes. Relate Cheng to Kempff, Arciuli to Michelangeli, and van Raat to Gilels, and you'll get my point.

Hallelujah Junction, with Maarten van Veen at the second piano, splits the difference between the aggressive, generously pedaled Andrew Russo/James Ehnes (Black Box) and the much leaner, crystal-clear Rolf Hind/Nicolas Hodges (Nonesuch) recordings. The ethereal impression van Raat conveys in China Gates' opening pages may have something to do with Naxos' slightly distant pickup, in contrast to the full-bodied detail BIS provides Jenny Lin's marvelous interpretation. Although I have yet to meet a China Gates recording I didn't like, on Nonesuch Nicolas Hodges' basic fast tempo and easily lilting inner rhythms appeal to me most of all.

To sum up, you can't go wrong with van Raat's strong performances, plus Naxos' modest cost and decent sonics. Just be aware that the more expensive Nonesuch reference compilation duplicates this repertoire in better sound, and adds a splendid performance of Road Games for violin and piano.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Post-minimalist John Luther Adams--not to be confused with "Nixon in China" composer John Adams--creates luminous musical worlds inspired by nature, particularly the landscapes of his adopted home, Alaska. THE PLACE WE BEGAN contains four evocative electroacoustic pieces that rework fragments of forgotten reel-to-reel tapes recorded by the Adams in the early `70s. Sculpting intriguing new soundscapes from furtive experiments in acoustic feedback and found sounds, Adams breathes new life into the material as a film documentarist would with old photographs and film footage.

“Everything That Rises” is a uniquely beautiful and magical hour of music for string quartet, performed by the celebrated, award-winning JACK Quartet. The composer writes about the piece: “Each musician is a soloist, playing throughout. Time floats and the lines spin out, always rising, in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward…until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.” “‘Everything That Rises’ is art without artifice, and its beauty transports the listener.” (New York Classical Review) “‘Everything That Rises” finds Mr. Adams exploring dissonance and just-intonation tuning, in the gentlest of ways.” (The New York Times) "JACK Quartet, superheroes of the new music world.” (Boston Globe) John Luther Adams, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the 2015 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, has been described by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross as “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” Adams, whose music is deeply rooted in the natural world, has worked with many prominent performers and venues.

Nothing and everything. Nowhere and everywhere.

Somewhere in the distance two pianos are playing. Slowly, very slowly, the sound comes towards you, and just as inevitably the sound recedes. This takes twelve and a half minutes. No development, no real movement, but no stasis either. What’s going on? Nothing and everything. Where’s the music going? Nowhere and everywhere. This sound world is our universe. It exists solely for itself. It’s electrifying.

So begins Dark Waters, the first track on this new John Luther Adams CD.

Before we go any further let’s get one thing clear, this is not the well known John Adams, the laid-back, new music guru, California-based composer of The Chairman Dances and The Transmigration of Souls, this is Meridian, Mississippi-born and, for the last thirty years, Alaska-based John Luther Adams. Starting as a rock drummer he discovered Frank Zappa, from Zappa’s notes he discovered Edgard Varèse, from Varèse’s sleeve-notes he discovered John Cage, but it was his discovery of Morton Feldman that gave him his epiphany. He studied at Cal Arts and after graduation started working in environmental protection, which took him to Alaska in 1975 where he moved permanently in 1978. If he’s known in this country at all it’s because he had a piece broadcast as part of the Masterprize competition some years ago.

Among Red Mountains, for a solo piano, is a study in clusters and opposing registers. Hard and brutal, unrelenting, yet strangely spellbinding and impossible to ignore. Just like Dark Waters, there’s no development of material as we understand the concept of development in the classical sense but this music does progress, if only in a very basic way, through repetition of the material. It’s hard to believe that there’s only two hands playing, considering the number of notes the poor pianist has to play.

Qilyuan is a duet for bass drums, and here the concept of minimal movement/maximum progress fails. Without actual pitches on which to hang our perceptions we’re left a bit at sea. And the bass drum isn’t renowned for its variety of timbre. True, it can play loud or soft, rolls can be executed, it can be hit with different sticks, but, and the percussion mafia isn’t going to like me for this, it isn’t an expressive instrument, it’s something you hit. One of the most impressive things about the other works on this disk is just how expressive they are; Dark Waters is quite beautiful in its hypnotic way. Just as Dark Waters and Among Red Mountains seem too short for their material, Qilyuan seems interminable.

Red Arc/Blue Veil, which gives the CD its title, is, in form, similar to Dark Waters. Starting quietly as a neo romantic nocturne for piano and vibraphone, it builds in intensity and volume, as the percussionist changes to crotales, and a big climax is built. Then a return to the music of the beginning, piano and vibes, gentle, restrained, beautiful. If the work has one fault it’s that there’s an overuse of the crotales – the overtones from the high frequencies over a period of time can be quite painful to listen to.

All in all, a very exciting issue from a composer who’s been working quietly and methodically for some time and he should be investigated because his music is haunting and quite unforgettable.

I assume that the performances are as good as we could ever hope for and the recorded sound is clear and very bright, oh yes, very bright indeed. There are no notes on the music, merely the names of the works and the performers, though the six sides of the “booklet” are very colourful. There are nine other CDs of Adams’s works and they are all worth investigating.

Lou Harrison called Adams "one of the few important young American composers," and he might just be right.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

Rather than an attempt to depict a reality-based musical view of China, pianist Jenny Lin's program seems designed to show how fantasy tends to mix with reality in many Western composers' attempts to evoke the flavor of a far-off, exotic land that held strong fascination. Of course, this fascination with the Orient in general began centuries ago with Europeans' first awareness of music, styles, food, and art, an awareness that grew to spawn periodic fads and influence fashions. Rulers stocked their palaces with treasures brought from the far east; Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated this attention and many other composers included or tried to include elements of what they thought was oriental "flavor" in some of their works. Most often, however, the result was as much like real Chinese as the Moo Goo Gai Pan from your local takeout.


Lin has chosen a varied and eminently colorful program that includes many unfamiliar works--but no one can complain that this isn't one of the more engaging, intriguing, original, and entertaining piano recordings to come along in the past year. And pianist Lin is a wonderful musician, in total technical command of this long (nearly 80 minutes) and formidable program. And (as long as we're on the subject) she imbues the music with an enticing mix of variously scented spices that truly bring out the unique, if rarely authentic flavors of each composer's creation. As you might expect the pentatonic scale and its permutations are a ubiquitous presence, a feature that may have seemed merely curious a century ago but now comes off as more than a little cartoonish and hackneyed. But it still can be made charming and even pretty, as in Martinu's The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, or sensuous, as in the surprising, Debussyian Lotus Land by Cyril Scott. Morton Gould's Pieces of China is a kind of Pictures at an Exhibition for the Kodak age. The idiom is a hybrid of borrowings from popular music styles (especially jazz) and the Western composer's "do-it-yourself Chinese music fake book"--but it's an absolutely charming condensation of cliché and postcard images, from "The Great Wall" to "Puppets" to "Slow Dance-Lotus".


Other highlights include Anton Arensky's Étude sur un theme chinois Op. 25 No. 3, a great encore piece that whirls and swirls its way through four exciting minutes; Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, loaded to overflowing with open fourths and pentatonic melodies; John Adams' predictably busy-but-going-nowhere evocation of China Gates; and Albert Ketèlby's In a Chinese Temple Garden, complete with gong. The prize for most authentic goes to Alexander Tcherepnin's Five ('Chinese') Concert Études Op. 52. The composer not only lived in the Far East for nearly three years in the 1930s, but he married a young Chinese concert pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming, for whom the etudes were written. Inventive and artful in their use of real Chinese melodies and impressions of Chinese instruments, these pieces have been virtually ignored by pianists but, especially as Lin presents them, they also deserve serious attention by others. Lin's fluid legatos, skillfully calibrated dynamics, and polished rapid fingering technique really shine here.


In the "works that have Chinese names but nothing to do with China" category are Abram Chasins' Rush Hour in Hong Kong, which from the sound of it just as well could be San Francisco or London or any other city; Ferruccio Busoni's Turandots Frauengemach, which is based on the folk tale Turandot, but whose theme is the very English tune "Greensleeves" which, according to the excellent liner notes, Busoni mistakenly thought was Chinese; and Rossini's Petite Polka chinoise, in which amusingly you can hear lots of Chopin but virtually no chinoiserie. Lin plays this with knowing humor and understated flair.


Lin's Steinway benefits from an acoustic that complements and naturally captures its full range and character, from robust lows to ringing highs. This is a release that every piano enthusiast should own. Those looking for a quirky but unfailingly delightful visit to China will enjoy it too. [7/1/2000]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

The only collection of the complete string quartet works of American composer John Adams. Includes liner notes by John Adams.

“Hearing the Attaca Quartet play is to experience a mix of high energy technical skill and musical intelligence. They are an ensemble devoted to their mission with a future of unlimited potential.” – John Adams

The internationally acclaimed Attaca Quartet has become one of America’s premier young performing ensembles. Praised by Strad for possessing “maturity beyond its members’ years,” they made their professional debut in 2007 as part of the Artists International Winners Series in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.

“Fellow Traveler” [is] an exhilarating new CD devoted to the complete string quartet works of John Adams...the [Attacca Quartet's] playing is exuberant, funky and exactingly nuanced...[A] vivacious, compelling set. -- Steve Smith, New York Times [3/29/2013]

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When it comes to composers broadly categorized under the heading of minimalism, it's rare to find works grouped by genre in the conventional way. But the Attacca Quartet, a young group out of New York's Juilliard School, shows what can be done with this set of three pieces by John Adams, entirely different in tone but clearly the products of the same composer. The best-known work on the program, John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994), has been recorded several times. It's a madcap work, full of humorous or satirical images and references to styles of music from the Baroque to rock, yet very tightly constructed. Its ten movements may be played in any order, and they do seem to suggest dance interpretation, even though Adams referred to them as "alleged dances" because the dance steps for them had not been invented yet. The String Quartet of 2008, by contrast, is in keeping with the general greater seriousness of the music of Adams' middle age. Its giant 20-minute first movement manages to weave sections of traditional sonata form together with a progression from the composer's basic minimalist style into more jazz-inflected music, and it's one of Adams' most ambitious structures. The Attacca Quartet does well with both these contrasting emotional worlds and is undaunted by the considerable technical challenges in the music. The small Fellow Traveler (the work is dedicated to opera director Peter Sellars and refers to his interest in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspected of being a Communist or "fellow traveler" by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation) closes out the program with melodies related to those of Adams' operatic works. Adams operas like Doctor Atomic and especially Nixon in China are better known than any of the music here, but this crackling release might carve out a place for the two larger works in the general quartet repertory.

-- All Music Guide

Adams, a Pulitzer-winning composer, writes music that draws much of it's inspiration from earth's primal forms and forces. These large, elemental concepts are never far below the surface of the music on Four Thousand Holes. The two works that comprise this album-constructions that grew from a blending of process and intuition-maintain a tight focus on music's inherent sensuality. The title piece, a bold, wonderfully quirky work, amasses and blends multiple tempo streams of simple triads with electro-acoustic "auras" to create a sense of beautifully suspended time. The other piece,... and bells remembered... for percussion quintet, spins forth a quiet and gently clangorous world of ringing tones. "I can't stop listening to John Luther Adams's Four Thousand Holes." [The New Yorker critic and author Alex Ross, Twitter] "John Luther Adams is a major figure and this disc-small but perfectly formed-is a notable addition to his discography." [International Record Review] "Four Thousand Holes may simply be Adams's best work to-date.... So far, 2011 has had it's lion's share of exquisite recordings, but this disc stands out as required listening... Album of the Week." [WQXR/Q2] "Despite a rather majestic climax, Four Thousand Holes unfolds at a measured pace, like a kind of contemplative walk in the woods in which the landscape changes slowly but dramatically over time. There is a spontaneous feel that belies the careful craftsmanship. Drury's piano part is made up exclusively of chords based on major and minor triads, with Deal's vibraphone and orchestra bells adding an extra sonic glitter. On top of it all, Adams generates a processed electronic 'aura,' derived from the piano lines, and it spreads out like a canopy of sound: dense, rich, and enveloping." [Josh Shea, Boston Globe] "In Four Thousand Holes... John Luther Adams explores an extended progression of radiant, overlapping triads glowing with a resigned majesty until they support a slowly ascending line leading to an ecstatic climax that caps off it's 32-minute journey. The effect is meditative and spiritual, absorbing, and probably in it's essence more overwhelming than it's modest scoring allows." [American Record Guide]

Conceived and realized in partnership with Q2 Music's Peabody award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, Splitting Adams is Alarm Will Sound's tribute to American composer John Adams, and in particular to his works Chamber Symphony (1992) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Presented with commentary tracks from MTC's host Nadia Sirota, Alarm Will Sound's artistic director Alan Pierson, and the composer himself, the podcast-plus-performance conveys a rare sense of interaction for the listener; not only does the music, performed in all its lush detail by the 17 musicians in AWS, capture and connect the long trajectory between the two works, but the commentary also shines a revealing light on the story behind the music.

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.

This CD contains four of Adam's beautifully shimmering, texturally rich compositions for various combinations of one or two pianos and various percussion instruments. Features performances by noted pianist/conductor/new music champion Stephen Drury, who is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory and has recorded for Tzadik, New Albion, Mode and more.

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

"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!)

For his third solo album for Alpha, keyboard polyglot Anthony Romaniuk returns to the piano, exploring the seven modes: derived from the major scale, the basis of ancient Greek music but nowadays endemic in folk, jazz, and beyond, each one containing a world of character and mood. Starting with John Adams' Phrygian Gates, Romaniuk devised a programme comprising music by P�rt, Ligeti, Radiohead, and Bj�rk, with his own original compositions; arrangements of traditional Catalan and English/Scottish music; and improvisations. Continuing his search for a personal and original sound, Romaniuk uses two pianos, including a Klavins upright grand piano (from the collection of Nils Frahm), which, thanks to it's massive soundboard and four-metre-long bass strings, overwhelms the listener. The addition of various analogue and digital audio effects, together with innovative recording techniques, brings the listener into a unique sonic landscape, approaching that of a sound installation.

Critically acclaimed composer John Luther Adams, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music, offers the first recordings of three of his recent string works: two string quartets, featuring the much-lauded JACK Quartet, and a four-movement work for a choir of 48 cellos. This is stunning, beautiful, sometimes monolithic, sometimes intimate music that is in a state of constant, subtle motion.

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

A new release from Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà is always something to look forward to – this time playing the music of John Adams. Here is an ensemble that gives listeners that rare, giddy feeling of expectation as when one realizes at the start of a good book or movie: "This is going to be good!"

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance!

“Lines Made by Walking” is a uniquely beautiful and magical recording of two string quartets—"Lines Made by Walking” and “untouched”—by influential, critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams, performed by the renowned JACK Quartet. Both works reflect Adams’ passion for nature’s elemental forces. The release of this recording coincides with Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s publication of Adams’ autobiography, “Silences So Deep.” John Luther Adams’ 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, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released seven recordings devoted to his work, including “Everything That Rises” and “The Wind in High Places.” Deemed “superheroes of the new music world” by the Boston Globe and chosen as Musical America’s 2018 Ensemble of the Year, JACK Quartet is “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity.” (Washington Post) The award-winning JACK tours and performs to critical acclaim throughout the world.

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

This is an enticing program, particularly for the two Franz Waxman items, which will have fans of the composer delighted. The great film composer's arrangement of Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 manages to squeeze bits of every tune in the original work's concluding quick section into just two-and-a-half minutes of violin and orchestra fireworks. Even more interesting is the Tristan and Isolde Fantasia for violin, piano, and orchestra--wonderfully lush and decadent, and proving once again that Isolde's Liebestod sounds much better without Isolde.

John Corigliano's Chaconne from The Red Violin is a splendid piece, and it makes an excellent foil to the Adams, which also features a chaconne as its central movement. The performances are quite good, but the competition is fierce: from Joshua Bell in the Corigliano, and from both Gidon Kremer (Nonesuch) and Robert McDuffie (Telarc) in the Adams. Chloë Hanslip isn't quite in their league. She's an estimable player, but her slender tone gets swamped now and then in the Waxman pieces, and she doesn't project the mysteriously lyrical opening movement of the Adams with as strong a profile as the competition (particularly at this relatively slow tempo).

Certainly I have no complaints about Slatkin's conducting, or regarding the well-balanced engineering. In the final analysis, although you can perhaps do a bit better in the Corigliano and Adams items, the value of this disc lies in bringing all of these varied and enjoyable works together at such an attractive price. Intelligent planning and solid musicianship certainly combine to overcome any minor technical or interpretive reservations.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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.

Stellar piano duo Quattro Mani's latest recording features John Adams's ebullient "Hallelujah Junction", and premiere recordings by Paul Moravec and Danish composer Bent Sørensen. Bonus tracks include rarities by Paul Creston and Paul Bowles. Fanfare’s Robert Carl writes that “Quattro Mani is one of the most enduring and leading keyboard duos anywhere.”

REVIEW:

John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction (1996) has had at least half a dozen recordings since the first, by Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind for Nonesuch. Pianists Steven Beck and Susan Grace of Quattro Mani take a very different tack from that recording, yet one that is equally compelling.

The miniatures that make up the remainder of the program by Creston, Bowles, Moravec, and Sørensen, are also effectively varied.

All in all, this is an enjoyable, wide-ranging program – I only wish there was more of it.

— Gramophone