Classical Music

“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.

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

In 1998, I reviewed the composer-led excerpts from John Adams’s collaboration with poet and activist June Jordon (1936–2002), I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. The title is a quote from a survivor of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in southern California. Here we have the whole work. In the earlier review, I assumed what was missing was connecting dialogue, a mistake corrected by one of Fanfare’s many frighteningly alert readers. In fact, the entire work is sung, and here the designation is “song play,” which seems to describe the form quite accurately. The work has much in common with pieces like Brecht-Weill’s Das kleine Mahagony or, more recently, the Rice-Lloyd Webber collaborations, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, in that the songs operate more or less as commentary to the onstage action. Like the Brecht-based Weill works, there is a great deal of implied and explicit social criticism, something that five years into the Bush administration seems much less quaint now. The problems with the work remain. The cardboard characters and their largely clichéd interactions keep everything at arm’s length, something compounded by the tendency of the songs to comment on the action rather than embody it. In addition, for all of its cleverness, Adams’ pastiche score rarely rises to the kind of immediate melodic impact one finds in Weill, Sondheim, or LaChiusa.

The plot, taken from the John Adams Web site, is as follows: in mid-1990s Los Angeles, David, a preacher, sings about his many love affairs and his current girlfriend, Leila. Dewain is arrested by Mike, a homophobic cop, for stealing two bottles of beer while trying to reach his lover, Consuelo, who is afraid that her son has been arrested by the INS. Tiffany videotapes the arrest; she wonders why Mike is not more receptive to her advances. Dewain resists arrest and Mike has him charged with a felony, meaning he could go to jail for 45 years under the “Three Strikes” law. At his trial, David, his lawyer, tries to explain his client’s point of view. After questioning Tiffany, Rick begins to be attracted to her. David visits Dewain in jail, where Dewain tells him he’s decided to go to law school. Leila wonders if David will ever settle down. As act II opens, Leila and David are making out on the couch in David’s office in his church when an earthquake hits. Leila is knocked unconscious. Mike visits Tiffany’s house; she asks him why he hasn’t been more forward, and he has a crisis of sexual identity; Rick suddenly appears, and she asks him out instead. Dewain, in his cell, recounts how the walls split open and he could see the outside, but, realizing that he was better off working inside the system, he did not escape. Consuelo tells him she is going back to El Salvador to fight for political freedom; Dewain decides to stay in Los Angeles. Lying in David’s arms, Leila begins to recover.

At the time of the premiere, Peter Sellars, the original director, offered up the hope that the work would become the play of choice for high schools everywhere. That seems as unlikely now as it did then (should anyone care, the high school musical of choice, once the rights become available, will be William Finn’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), in part because of the sexual and sometimes heavy-handed political content as well as the sheer difficulty of the music. For all its flaws, the work gains enormously in stature when heard complete and, to set the show in context, it is a whole lot more interesting musically than Rent or any of the Andrew Lloyd Webber “rock operas.”

The performance is very fine. Darius de Haas, returning from the original cast, as David the preacher and Kimako Xavier Trotman as Dewain, the gang member, are the only Americans in the cast. It would be idle to pretend that anyone could replace Audra McDonald as Consuelo but Martina Mühlpointner is very good. If you listen closely, some of the singers have slight accents, occasionally making their words a fraction less distinct but, frankly, you have to listen for it and it makes no impact at all on the overall success of the enterprise. As before, the work is recorded like the musical that it is rather than in the defined space more commonly associated with classical music. Therefore, a discussion of recording quality is really beside the point. Extensive notes and a detailed synopsis cued to the individual numbers are included, but no text.

FANFARE: John Story

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

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

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.

"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!)

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.

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

Includes 1 CD & 1 DVD

Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot in June 2013. In May 2014 the orchestra and Morlot took Become Ocean to Carnegie Hall for the annual Spring for Music festival.

Become Ocean is a 45-minute-long work for full orchestra. Adams borrowed the title from a verse by composer John Cage, written in honor of fellow composer Lou Harrison’s birthday. Describing Harrison’s music, Cage wrote, “Listening to it / we become / ocean.” A visionary whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world, Adams inscribed the following statement on the score of Become Ocean, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”

R E V I E W:

With their first collaboration, Ludovic Morlot, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and composer John Luther Adams have struck gold. Become Ocean, Morlot's first large-scale commission as music director of the SSO, is a symphonic work that feels even vaster than its forty-two-minute span. By dividing the large ensemble into three interlocking orchestras, Adams created a score that works on multiple levels: it's an abstract sonic experience at one extreme and, at the other, an evocation of nature and its irresistible force.

-- Thomas May, Listen Magazine

This disc was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Small Ensemble Performance."
John Adams is one of the major faces on the scene of late 20th century music composition. Known best as a minimalist, Adams' style has really varied quite a bit. "Shaker Loops" is a piece firmly rooted in the minimalist style. Harmonic motion is either slow or non-existent and rhythm often becomes the focus. This four-movement work explores many different colors, varying from impassioned to atmospheric.
"Phrygian Gates," for solo piano, is becoming part of the standard repertoire. Unlike other minimalist piano compositions, the length is not prohibitive, and it is quite accessible to listen to. There are many repeated figures and harmony, but the music has a bit more swing than "Shaker Loops," and is warmer in mood.
The "Chamber Symphony" is very jazzy, but not harmonically static. Sound fragments seem to overlap and interact, and in many cases it almost sounds as if acoustic musicians were imitating a record on the wrong speed, a tape played backwards, or some other non-acoustic sound. All of this is played with style and commitment by the Ensemble Modern.

Lauded by the New York Times as a "...hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong," John Luther Adams's Canticles of the Holy Wind, performed by the renowned chamber choir The Crossing, is quite possibly his most technically challenging choral work, and yet the music's mesmerizing aura of stillness encourages listening at its most elemental. The piece was composed for four choirs of eight singers each, and moves through spaces that are as fantastical ("Sky with Four Suns") as they are peaceful ("The Hour of the Doves"), always with a connection to the inner world within us, as well as the world around us. "John allows us to interrupt our otherwise endlessly forward-tumbling lives," notes Donald Nally, The Crossing's conductor, "and experience these sounds as if we were sitting in the woods for an hour. An hour of wind and of sky and of birds. We are drawn to this music, not just for the beauty of its shimmering harmonies and the overwhelming climactic moments, but also for way it inspires a ‘hearing’ of nature, in real time, as we sing it."

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REVIEW:

There are 34 singers listed in The Crossing, a professional chamber choir founded about a decade ago. The singing, always controlled and disciplined, also has the ring of uninhibited spontaneity to it. It’s as if, for a little more than an hour, the singers cease to be humans and transform themselves into the skies, the birds, and winds, and the Earth itself.

It might be a little too intense for some listeners, like a good storm, but Canticles of the Holy Winds is one of the most impressive things I’ve heard so far in 2017. This disc will be on my Want List for sure.

– Fanfare (R. Tuttle)

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