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The real American folksong London
Royal Albert Hall
08/22/2004 -
Maurice Ravel, orch. Percy Grainger: Miroirs -- La vallée des cloches
Colin McPhee: Tabuh-tabuhan
Charles Ives and others, orch. John Adams and David Brohn: Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence
John Adams: Doctor Atomic -- "Easter Eve 1945"
John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur
Maurice Ravel, orch. Percy Grainger: Miroirs -- La vallée des cloches
Colin McPhee: Tabuh-tabuhan
Charles Ives and others, orch. John Adams and David Brohn: Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence
John Adams: Doctor Atomic -- "Easter Eve 1945"
John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur
Audra McDonald (soprano), Tracy Silverman (electric violin)
John Adams (conductor)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
A John Adams Prom is getting to be almost as much of a fixture in the season as the old British and Viennese nights. Last year's was a deeply emotional affair, a meditation on mourning programmed around On the transmigration of souls, Adams' memorial for 9/11. This year, the centre of the programme was a fragment of a serious and timely work, Adams' and Peter Sellars' opera-in-progress on Oppenheimer and the bomb, Doctor Atomic. Kitty Oppenheimer's reflection on the horror of what her husband and his colleagues were doing touches on first-principle questions of means and ends, and of the responsibilities of power, but presents a moving sense of hope arising from the same human potential that built the bomb in order to defeat the Nazis. The aria was more formal, but the mood was close to that of Transmigration. The opera as a whole promises a greater exploration of American optimism as well as the horror of what humanity can do. Its premiere is on 1 October 2005 in San Francisco, with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the role of Kitty Oppenheimer, although Audra McDonald's powerful performance carried throughout the Albert Hall, and she would be fine in the War Memorial.
The rest of the evening, though, emphasized what Adams referred to in a pre-performance talk as the pleasure principle in music, a reminder of how rewarding civilization and art can be in themselves. The first part of the programme was a study in technique, two of the three works arrangements by other composers. Percy Grainger's orchestration of Ravel's brief piano evocation of church bells, La vallée des cloches, treated the slightly off-kilter rhythms of the bells like a gamelan, while the strings interposed a luscious, nostalgic melody. Colin McPhee's Tabuh-tabuhan combined somewhat similar gamelan-like ritual percussion with equally rhythmic perky western melodies something like show tunes in what looks like the grand-daddy of minimalism.
Adams' orchestral arrangements of three Ives songs and four early twentieth-century American popular songs in Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence added a third element to the mix, Ives' emotional but often disruptive take on traditional hymns: "Down East" floated around "Nearer my God to thee" in both words and music; "Serenity", at the centre of the set, was a setting of two verses of Whittier, lovely, dynamic but balanced. "At the River" was a more fragmentary setting, perhaps overwrought. Interspersed with these were the four arrangements of popular songs that brought out the ingenuity of both words and music and the relentless but infectious optimism of ragtime, at the expense of the assumptions about gender and race that go along with it. McDonald, who reworked some of the more unpleasant lyrics for the occasion, gave an amazing, versatile performance, and the BBCSO played with precision and brio.
The final work, The Dharma at Big Sur, was commissioned for last year's opening of the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Its rich sounds are probably designed to make the most of the hall's famously excellent sound, but it sounded pretty good in the newly reupholstered Albert Hall. It is a thoroughly Californian work in its homage to earlier minimalists (the second movement is named after Terry Riley's home, Sri Moonshine) and its combined programme of the dramatic scarped landscape at Big Sur, on the coast between Los Angles and San Francisco, and a new-age quest for truth in the oppositions of day and night. Adams described the soloist, Tracy Silverman, as his Kerouac figure, suggesting a more historical context for the theme of the west coast as the destination of free spirits. Silverman, playing a six-string electric violin, rode with ease among the orchestral lines. Dean Moriarty was never so mellow.
HE Elsom
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