aworks :: "new" american classical music

Harmonielehre (1985). John Adams /fresh recording/

Ted Rubright points out Amazon has an MP3 download of the David Robinson/St. Louis Symphony performance of John Adams' Harmonielehre. No equivalent CD. Note also that Rubright played percussion on the recording.

From an Amazon review:

Robertson emphasizes the "Beethoven on steroids" violence of the opening chords, jacking up the timpani part to almost ear-splitting levels. But he doesn't just dwell on the loud parts of the score.

Harmonielehre (1985). John Adams /recent comments/

• Likewise, I've never heard a more precisely balanced, gorgeous version of the second movement than the one presented here. The sound world here runs from Debussy's impressionism toward Holst's outer Planets, with agonizing disturbances inspired by the Adagio of Mahler's Symphony No. 10.  Night After Night
• Adams' East/West fusion seems more brilliant than ever. He's not forgetting his roots, having named his 1985 Harmonielehre after Arnold Schoenberg's book on harmony (written in Vienna), but has such a California dreaminess as to be an ambassador for the minimalist movement, whose hypnotic, pulsing repetition arrived here within time-honored beginning-middle-and-end architecture. Philadelphia Inquirer
• Pero, su obra más representativa en el minimalismo es “Harmonielehre” (1.985), donde intenta seguir la música repetitiva basada en una armonía tradicional, utilizando la forma de una gran orquesta sinfónica. En El Aire
• The orchestra made all the wonderful big noises in John Adams's “Harmonielehre” on Saturday, but it was less successful at rhythms that must be sharp enough to cut. New York Times
• While not the most critically well received of Adams' works its [Road Movie's] overall feel has made it one of my favorites along side the highly exaulted Harmonielehre, Dharma at Big Sur, El Dorado and Short Ride in a Fast Machine. call me classical
• Last night I got to play John Adams’ Harmonielehre with the SLSO once again. Ahh. It was really a blast. I mean that almost literally. It rocks. My part includes mallets (all kinds) and my favorite moment, the bass drum blast at the end. Rubright.com
• If Bernstein once described Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique in terms of an LSD trip, then this too took us into fantastical realms. While the outer movements delivered bold pillars of chords with percussionists rushing from instrument to instrument, the middle movement made connections with Takemitsu's world in its floating Debussian harmonies. New Zealand Herald

Harmonielehre (1985). John Adams /harmonic divergence/

Tim Page doesn't like Adams' Harmonielehre but did like the National Symphony Orchestra's performance:

Even setting aside the outright quotations -- from the Sibelius Symphony No. 4, from Mahler's Symphony No. 10 and from Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder," among others -- much of the piece comes across as appropriated, a tour of distant masterpieces as seen through cheap binoculars.

Tim Smith takes a different view:

But what really grabs the willing ear in Harmonielehre is the uplift generated by the two outer movements, a sensual, visceral pulling away from the bonds of conventional musical expectation. Surrendering to that release is one of most exhilarating, no-artificial-stimulant experiences you can get in a concert hall.

Jens Laurson as well:

Along with Adams’ Violin Concerto, Short Ride..., Shaker Loops and El Niño it is among the finest, most accessible of his works… swelling and ebbing rousingly, hinting at minimalism only faintly in the first movement. 

And Dublin has a John Adams festival this weekend, including of course Harmonielehre.

Me, just thinking of the piece has triggered another ear-worm, this time of the opening I don't particularly like.

Harmonielehre (1985). John Adams /veteran's day/

To celebrate Veteran's Day, San Jose has a modest downtown parade with a working-class, personal, and friendly feel and since it's San Jose, the crowd is very integrated and multi-ethnic. Since I've read a fair amount of political vitriol lately, this event provides a pleasant contrast.

Last year, I remember seeing in the parade Viet Nam vets as well as Vietnamese vets. This year, I had an even bigger surprise. Following a banner proclaiming "Soviet Veterans of World War II," fifteen or twenty elderly men and women walked in the parade, mostly carrying American flags although there was at least one with the former Soviet Union flag.

Is it right to have these people in this parade?  Let me think it through. The holiday celebrates living veterans so that's good. But weren't these our enemies at one time? My WWI history is weak but I don't think Czarist Russia was particulary anti-American. Then, at the beginning of WW II, the Soviet Union was allied with Germany but at some point, flipped, bore the brunt of the German military machine, and played a (the?) major role in the defeat of the common enemy. Things turned worse for decades and then it got better.

So, the ex-soldiers in today's parade represent our valliant allies at the time, without which life would be much different. Three cheers for these as well as our traditional veterans...

By the way, Stephen Hickens recommends music for today, including John Adams' civil war-based The Wound-Dresser.

Back to the United States and it's sometime enemy, I don't know how much American classical music was performed during the Soviet era. I do have a CD box set of an 1988 Leningrad contemporary music festival, with music by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Tchaikovsky, etc., and the Lithuanian Philharmonic Orchestra performing John Adams' Harmonielehre. Mike Silverton reviews this performance and others of the same work here.

Finally, an apparently positive comment from a Russian chat board:

John Adams и все-все-все Единочаятели! Скажите о Джоне Адамсе! Очень любопытно как кто к нему относится, особенно к масштабным симфоническим произведениям типа "Harmonielehre". Ответы можно не аргументировать.