John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes.
Among Adams’s works are several of the most performed contemporary classical pieces today: Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, Chamber Symphony, Absolute Jest, and the Violin Concerto. His stage works, many in collaboration with director Peter Sellars, include Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, A Flowering Tree, the Passion oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and Girls of the Golden West. Adams’s most recent opera, Antony and Cleopatra, featuring a libretto adapted by the composer from Shakespeare’s tragedy, received its European premiere at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in fall 2023 in a production directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer and conducted by Adams himself. Earlier this season, Frenzy for orchestra received its world premiere with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle.
Adams is the 2019 recipient of the Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science”—the only American composer to be so honored in the prize’s 66-year history. As an advocate of his composer colleagues, Adams has premiered more than 100 new works ranging from composers such as Glass, Riley, Rihm, Wolfe, and Gordon to young emerging composers. He received the 2021 Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University in recognition for his “exceptional commitment to American composers.” Adams has additionally received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Northwestern University, Cambridge University, and The Juilliard School. Since 2009, he has held the position of Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A provocative writer, he is author of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction, and his writings have appeared in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.
As a conductor of his own works and wide variety of repertoire, Adams has appeared with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, New York and Los Angeles philharmonics, and the orchestras of Seattle, Cleveland, and Rotterdam. In 2022, Nonesuch Records released the 40-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings that spans more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label.
—Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine depicts the simultaneous exuberance and anxiety of a late-night thrill ride in a sports car. As the composer puts it, “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” Since the late 1980s, critics have been at pains to point out that Adams has “moved beyond minimalism,” so it is interesting to hear again what proper minimalism sounds like.
Composed in 1986 as a fanfare for a summer festival given by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Short Ride in a Fast Machine has become one of Adams’s most frequently performed works. In the score, Adams designates this pulsating music delirando, pervaded by the sound of the woodblock, whose persistence Adams describes as “almost sadistic.” Short and fast it certainly is—flying by in four minutes—but the different levels of sound repeating and interacting with relentless peppiness makes the work seem longer. The final, joyful fanfare at the end assures us that the wild ride has ended with everyone still alive.
The exquisite tone painting in Mediodía en el llano (Midday on the Plain) is the work of a composer and educator who did a great deal to put Venezuelan symphonic music on the map, helping set the stage for the creation, in 1975, of El Sistema. Antonio Estévez was a composer, oboist, and conductor, known mainly as a nationalist but considerably more than that. He composed Mediodía en el llano in 1942, two years before graduating in Caracas and subsequently studying in the United States (including at Columbia University and Tanglewood) and Europe. In the 1950s, he composed Tríptico ancestral for mixed choir, Concierto para orquesta, and La cantata criolla, the latter widely regarded as the most important Venezuelan nationalist work of the 20th century. In the 1960s and ’70s, he expanded his modernist credentials with a series of electro-acoustic works.
This work was conceived as an orchestral suite in three parts evoking a day on the Venezuelan plains, but Estévez abandoned the outer movements depicting dawn and sunset and published the central movement on its own as Mediodía en el llano. Estévez is known for fiery, rhythmic works such as Cantata criolla, but this piece is the opposite, an exercise in sublime calm and stillness. It’s often compared by commentators to the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, but it has its own distinctive character. “Although I find it arid, above all,” Estévez stated, “it is also very Venezuelan. Venezuelan in a very broad sense, since we had never heard Venezuelan symphonic music before.”
An atmosphere of spellbinding mystery is sustained throughout the work, beginning with ambiguous harmonies that move slowly toward resolution. A sense of immobility creates the “arid” feeling spoken of by the composer. Piccolo and celesta suggest birdsong, a piquant counterpoint, as horns and percussion sing haunting, choral-like motifs. The woodwind writing is particularly seductive, reflecting Estévez’s experience as an oboist. Trembling strings over shimmering cymbals create an underlying tension and suspense. The tempo briefly quickens as the work builds to a pair of majestic climaxes, finally settling down for a final shimmer in the upper strings.
Alberto Ginastera is one of the most important and beloved Latin American composers, his range encompassing everything from exuberant folkloric pieces such as the Four Dances from Estancia, performed on this program, to more abstract later works such as the Violin Concerto (recently championed by Hilary Hahn) and the late string quartets. His pieces are part of a continuing explosion of Latin American symphonic music, which is more visible than ever thanks in no small part to its championing by Gustavo Dudamel. The complex development of this music is marked by multicultural benchmarks, including Gottschalk’s Afro-Caribbean experiments, Nazareth’s tangos, Villa-Lobos’s prolific output, Varèse’s Ecuatorial, and Copland’s El salón México.
Ginastera wrote the ballet Estancia in 1941 for Lincoln Kirstein, who had commissioned Copland’s Billy the Kid, but his American Ballet Caravan folded before the ballet could be produced, and it was not mounted until 1952. Fortunately, Ginastera extracted four dances to be played as a suite; it premiered successfully in 1943 in Buenos Aires, rocketing the young Ginastera to international fame.
The music depicts a day in the life of gauchos (Argentinian cowboys) on a cattle ranch (estancia) in the pampa. Ginastera’s description is passionate and precise: “Whenever I have crossed the pampa or lived in it for a time, my spirit felt itself inundated by changing impressions, now joyful, now melancholy, some full of euphoria and others replete with a profound tranquility, produced by its limitless immensity and by the transformation that the countryside undergoes in the course of the day.”
The exuberant opening section, “Los trabajadores agrícolas” (“Agricultural Workers”), comes from the “morning section” of the ballet, jolting us out of our seats with a syncopated, brass-powered folk dance called a malambo, with percussion providing a hypnotic heartbeat. Harmonies are basically tonal—Ginastera’s nontonal experiments came later in his career—but subtle bitonal touches add to the excitement. The second movement, “Danza del trigo” (“Wheat Dance”), is a languid contrast, suggesting the “profound tranquility” referenced by the composer. In the opening, the flute sings a plaintive melody over whispered percussion; the serene middle section begins in the strings, melting into an exquisite violin solo. “Los peones de hacienda” (“The Cattlemen”) charges in with another fast movement, full of shifting rhythms and bold syncopation, powered by timpani and brass. “Malambo” is the most over-the-top of all the movements, depicting a dance contest between the gauchos. Full of wrenching dissonance and obsessive repetitions, it pounds toward a euphoric climax.
At once the most popular and most controversial of Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth has always been loved by audiences and conductors for its drama and lyricism. For years, it was castigated by critics for its “conservatism” and capitulation to Soviet censorship—that is, until critics declared it to be secretly anti-Soviet. There is no question that Shostakovich wanted to get off Stalin’s blacklist: Denounced by the government newspaper Pravda for his dissonance and “decadent” modernism, he was forced to withdraw his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk after Stalin himself saw and condemned it. His experimental Fourth Symphony, not heard until 1961, was cancelled for the same reason.
The political convolutions regarding the Fifth Symphony seem endless and ever-changing. Some say that Shostakovich did not label the work “the creative reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism,” as numerous commentators have maintained; that nauseating designation came from a Soviet critic during the symphony’s unveiling in 1937, not the composer—and the work itself is not nearly as patriotic and conservative as is claimed by its detractors. Although Shostakovich provides classical structure, diatonic harmony, singable tunes, a folksy dance movement, and a finale with the requisite “heroic” sound, he also gets in a considerable amount of darkness and pessimism.
Were it not for the work’s history, it would be difficult to imagine anyone finding facile optimism in a symphony so full of shadows and long stretches of gloom. The somber first and third movements, and the wailing from the strings in the middle of the finale are hardly cheering; and the ominous fade-out that closes the first movement seems a haunting echo of the ending of the Fourth Symphony. These elements today are often interpreted as subversive “codes,” but they seem more upfront than secretive. How indeed did Shostakovich get such an easy pass from the Soviet censors, even if they did have notoriously tin ears?
Shostakovich had learned from bitter experience when to pull his punches. It wouldn’t do to have the last movement end gloomily, but it was okay for the first. As for the blaze of sunlight that closes the symphony, it was apparently written to order. In a startling passage from the controversial Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich from 1979, Shostakovich says about the ending, “The rejoicing is forced, under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”
Many have questioned the authenticity of Testimony, and no one can say for sure whether Shostakovich actually said this. Still, many maestros insist that the basic idea is true. Mstislav Rostropovich, for example, believed the coda should be played with brutal slowness because Shostakovich meant for the ostensibly triumphant fanfares to represent nails hammered in a coffin rather than victory: a grim anti-Soviet protest. But the satirical point, if there really is one, is often lost on the audience, which cheers wildly and unambiguously, as well they might after blazing major-key fanfares and drums. When Leonard Bernstein conducted the symphony in the early 1960s, he made the finale fast and exciting, decidedly non-ironic. His reading was enthusiastically affirmed by Shostakovich and is still one of the most celebrated.
One can always listen to the symphony as music, without ideological parsing. It is, after all, an eloquent, forceful, strikingly lyrical work. To some extent, it is modeled on the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, a composer whom Shostakovich admired. The juxtaposition of the sublime with the banal; the fondness for marches, some funereal, some sardonic; the buffoonish folk tunes in the scherzo; and the hymn-like lyricism in the slow movement all sound at times like Mahler with a Russian accent. There are also touches of Beethoven, especially the motifs binding together the long first movement and their return in the finale. Yet the sensibility and sound world are distinctly Shostakovich’s own.
The overall picture is not all that different from that of the Sixth, Eighth, and Tenth symphonies—all powerful, emotionally ambiguous works that generated political controversies of their own—though none like the contentious back-and-forths attending the Fifth. Conductor Marin Alsop perhaps has it right when she says that “Shostakovich has become a receptacle for people’s polarized political viewpoints.” This symphony is a summary statement, “complex” and “conflicted”; it offers “an opening for hopefulness, for a certain nobility in survival.”
—Jack Sullivan
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