aworks :: "new" american classical music

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /all our mileages may vary/

I'm not surprised about any lukewarm response to John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony since I share that impression. But I am surprised at widely divergent reactions to other music of the composer.

First, David Toub, who appears to generally like the music of Adams, can't stand to listen to Violin Concerto. Then, Steve Hicken, who lists Violin Concerto as the one Adams piece in his 101 essential pieces of the 20th century, admits he doesn't "get" the music of Adams.

Since the instant I heard Shaker Loops on the radio twenty years ago, I've always felt I "got" this music although it's possible that as Adams' techniques have grown in sophistication, that feeling may be diminishing. And the idea that he might ultimately be remembered as an opera composer boggles my mind, Nixon in China's I'm the Wife of Mao Zedong not withstanding:

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aworks: violin concerto. doctor atomic. nixon in china. youtube: i'm the wife of mao zedong from nixon in china

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /the john adams reader/

Amazon sent me some well-targeted email:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Violin Concerto/Shaker Loops also purchased The John Adams Reader. For this reason, you might like to know that The John Adams Reader is now available . You can order your copy at a savings of 37% by following the link below.

Hmm, the editor is Thomas May, a music critic who also happens to be the Religion and Spirituality Editor at Amazon.com. Can't "search inside the book," though.

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /marin alsop/

I was speed-reading through a bunch of blogs just now but I thought I read that President Bush just nominated conductor Marin Alsop to the Supreme Court. Wow, we weren't expecting that one, were we? When I saw Alsop conduct Adams' Violin Concerto at the Cabrillo Music Festival, she gave no indication of her stand on Rove v. Wade, so legally, she may be a bit of an unknown.  She does have a record of advocacy for American contemporary music, at least in Santa Cruz County, so that's enough for me. Barbara and Dianne, if you are reading this, vote yes on Marin, please.

Joshua Kosman's analysis in the Chronicle:

Alsop says she plans to chart a middle course.

Jens Laurson also has details of the nomination, focusing on the reaction in Baltimore for some reason...

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /summer/

Via del.icio.us/thestandingroom, an LA Times article where various denizens of (mostly Southern)  California talk about what they will listen to this summer. Most interesting was Dawn Upshaw who greatly praises a Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performance ("a shattering emotional experience," presumably in a good way) and who will listen to John Adam's Violin Concerto:

It's no surprise that I am a huge John Adams fan (both as listener and performer), but I've never gotten to know his Violin Concerto, written back in 1993, recorded in 1996. I look forward to finally familiarizing myself with this piece this summer.

Me? At Amoeba/Berkeley today, I passed on that special edition of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme; it's a remastered recording of the jazz classic as well as a live performance and includes the two extant out-takes. My question at the time was, do I really need a two-CD set of one work, that I've often heard. Yes, but later.  I did buy "four for the price of three" clearance CDs including Alvin Curren, Benjamin Lees, and Chris Brown.

I have a big backlog of music I've ripped but haven't heard yet that should get my attention this summer. And once it gets hot, I always listen to Mozart.

Oh, and it occurs to me, I heard the Adams Violin Concerto at the mission in San Juan Bautista, California (think Vertigo), as part of the Cabrillo Music Festival, and it was hot there as well, both in performance and temperature.

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /pittsburgh/

It's John Adams night at aworks...

Mark Wigglesworth conducts the Pittsburgh with Leila Josefowicz playing John Adams' Violin Concerto. Mark Kanny likes the violinist's performance:

Josefowicz played the lyrical opening movement with exceptional beauty of tone and rhythmic acuity. The slow movement is a chaconne subtitled, "Body through which the dream flows," and was far more beautiful last night than the premiere recording by Gidon Kremer. For the all the beauty of her playing, Josefowicz has plenty of bite to her attacks, and virtuosity to burn in the rapid finale.

Andrew Druckenbrod also likes Josefowicz's playing but doesn't like the conducting:

The violinist, in this case the talented Leila Josefowicz, interacts in marvelous ways, from soaring above it to grooving in the trenches with it.

But Wigglesworth inexplicably pushed this underlying framework down, turning the interaction of rhythms into a quiet muddle. While this allowed Josefowicz to be heard, the notes she plays mean more when complemented by the harmonic and rhythmic context...

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /meet the music/

Meet the Music is a website devoted to introducing specific classical works that will be frequently played this year in the US -- it's mostly traditional composers so far although Elena Park has a short essay on Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Greg Sandow, the impetus for the site, writes on John Adam's Violin Concerto and how Adams sought an alternative to the concerto convention of soloist/orchestra dialogue. Quoting Sandow quoting the composer:

So he came up with the idea of the violin playing nearly all the time. Or, as he put it (if I may repeat the wonderful thought from him I quoted at the start of this): “The orchestra [is] the organized, delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues, and bones; the violin [is] the dream that flows through it.”

By the way, although I vaguely remembered Greg Sandow mentioning the Meet the Music concept on his blog, I found the site today in a roundabout way.  Checking aworks referrers, I found this site, which takes the aworks rss feed and publishes the first fifty words of each post (albeit with a link to my original post). Then, the site throws up Google ads (generating revenue for that site).  Ignoring the money aspect, two things from those ads got my attention in the context of aworks: one, the ad for Meet the Music which was the first I had heard of the actual site and two, that the rest of the ads were all symphonic orchestra links either for tickets or recordings (Pacific, Prague, BBC, Alaska). Would I be doing the community a public service by signing up aworks for Google AdSense?  Would I be endorsing an institution, the orchestra, that isn't particularly meaningful to me right now?  Is it ironic if I were to engage in commerce solely motivated by the public good?

For the record, whether or not I try Google Ads, I'll reiterate my Amazon associate status, where if someone clicks on an Amazon-supplied graphic or link on aworks and actually purchases something, I would, in theory, get a small cut. I also found this site which uses the aworks feed, under the banner of music headlines (scroll down to see my somewhat stale content although without ads). Finally, LiveJournal has apparently automatically created a new shadow user, aworks, presumably to make it easy for LiveJournal users to subscribe to the feed. I'm all in favor of that although it looks strange to see my full content wrapped in LJ graphics and I don't know what to do if someone posts a comment there instead of here.

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /leila josefowicz/

Andrew Sullivan blogs about a visit to LA including a concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall:

...and then took in a gorgeous John Adams piece and some over-the-top Shostakovich in Frank Gehry's Philharmonic crumple...I guess it goes to show that stereotypes have a limited usefulness. Classical music, peerless architecture, old friends and walk, walk, walk. All in L.A. And it rained too. Heavenly.

Leila Josefowicz performed the Adams Violin Concerto. I don't have her Koch  recording. I probably have fifty John Adams CDs and I just realized I've blogged tonight about two I don't have. And I call myself a completist...

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams

 

In a recent post, I suggested John Adams' Violin Concerto was better than his work for electric violin, The Dharma in Big Sur.  I made this claim on the basis of two reasonably attentive listens to the now-unavailable BBC Real stream.  In comparison, I've heard the Violin Concerto live in the intimate setting of Mission San Juan Bautista (and fifteen dramatic feet from the San Andreas Fault), and in recordings by Gidon Kremer, Robert McDuffie, and Leila Josefowicz. And yet, I still think, despite shallow exposure to The Dharma at Big Sur, it will prove to be the inferior work.

the rest is noise  relevantly remarks about the Russian composer Gavriil Popov:

I'd had a couple of Popov recordings in my library for a while, but, as so often, hearing the music live showed me something that the CDs had not.

I had a similar experience with the Philip Glass opera, Akhnaten, in its recent Oakland production (and returning this month!).  The CD was good if not compelling and the documentary explained the storyline (and taught me what a counter-tenor was).  But until seeing it in the intimate Oakland production where the music and the drama (and the artists) made it spellbinding.  Of course, that was opera where the visual is so important.  For two  instrumental performances illuminating the compressed experience of CD, Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing the Ligeti Etudes and the Arditti Quartet playing the Ligeti String Quartets both sparked a strong interest in those works.  And in a counter-example, I heard the San Francisco Symphony, in Grace Cathedral, play a concert of Igor Stravinsky's music, was underwhelmed, and have not listened much to Stravinsky since.

Back to the Violin Concerto, Adams has an interesting comment:

I would say very frankly that there are things about the concerto that even to this day cause me trouble when I hear it. I continue to conduct it quite often, and each time I come back to it I find myself going through oscillating periods of doubt or insecurity over certain aspects of the piece. There are moments when it seems to me very satisfying, very true to what I'd want from a concerto written in my own time. But then there are times when the choice of the conventional form irritates me and makes me wish I'd struck out into less well-charted territory. In a certain sense the work is quite archaic in its form; it's a throwback to very traditional means of discourse and syntax, even down to the placement of the cadenza in the traditional location and the fast-slow-fast scenario...

Maybe Adams has managed to capture the inherent tension between tradition and innovation, giving the work power.

Amazon samples. NewMusicBox has score PDFs.