"Traditional terms?" - interview with John Adams

Composer John Adams recently appeared as conductor with Australian orchestras, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. I interviewed him for the printed program booklets for both orchestras. A complete version of this interview is reproduced below:

‘Can’t be defined in traditional terms’: Gordon Williams speaks to John Adams

The American composer, John Adams has had a longstanding presence in Australia. Nixon in China was the featured opera at the 1992 Adelaide Festival, and in 2002 the Adelaide Festival saw the Australian premiere of El Niño, in a version directed by Adams’ regular collaborator Peter Sellars, who had resigned as Festival Director some months before. I interviewed Adams in the Northern Foyer of the Sydney Opera House in 2000 at the time of the Australian premiere of Naive and Sentimental Music, one of a couple of Sydney Symphony co-commissions. Adams says he feels badly that he hasn’t been out to Australia since, because he knows what a great musical culture Australia has. He was particularly impressed when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Huw Humphreys asked for an ‘all-Adams’ concert in Melbourne. But there have been major additions to Adams’ output in the intervening years (City Noir, operas Dr Atomic (2005) and A Flowering Tree (2006), and a second oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2011)), so it’s a good opportunity to see how his views might have changed over the years. 

When I interviewed him in 2000 Adams was almost patriotically proud of Minimalism, an ‘-ism’ which had done much to bring audiences back to contemporary classical music in the 1970s and 80s. This time he was almost bemused that I began by asking him about it.

"I think that it was a very important stylistic development or invention, and I think it spawned several masterpieces – certainly [Philip Glass's] Einstein on the Beach and early Steve Reich pieces - but I haven't really thought in terms of Minimalism myself since the early 1980s. I'm surprised when the subject comes up but then, of course, audiences know my early pieces like Shaker Loops, and think about them and listen to them more than I do, so it's understandable. I mean it's a style of composition that is defined by three specific things – it's emphatically tonal and it's got a regular pulse. It uses repetition to create its musical structures. But that said: I sublimated Minimalism. I was very restless within its confines and tried to break out of it early on."

Anyone who has seen the rapturous reaction of an audience to Harmonielehre (such as when Markus Stenz conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the work in 2004) will realise that Adams is a living orchestral composer with the magnetic pull of a Beethoven or Mahler; and a great deal of that power can be credited to Adams' ability to re-create tension and climax in the way that has been exciting in western music since at least the classical period. I put it to him that he had come back to traditional cadential motion refreshed by Minimalism.

"My music is definitely harmonic and has a sense of tonality, but it's too elusive and evasive and it moves so quickly that I don't think it can be defined in any particular traditional terms. What's interesting in recent pieces is my use of mode. I'm not unlike a jazz performer in that I create modes using various combinations of whole steps and half steps and they generate both the harmonic and melodic feel of the piece. It's not a new development but I think I've given a new spin to it. I really think that if there's been a success with audiences with, for example, the music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass or myself, it first and foremost relies on the beauty of the harmonic relationships. That rhythmic thing is very important, the sense of atmosphere with all of us, but if you took Steve Reich's music and made it atonal or made it harmonically indifferent nobody would want to listen to it."

I home in on what he says about harmony as that's really the sphere in which audience reaction to contemporary music has been played out in the past 100 years. Adams has used Schoenbergian technique for entertainment value (imagined in a cartoon-like context in his Chamber Symphony), and the title of his 1985 symphony Harmonielehre pays tribute to a 12-tone master "who knew tonal harmony better than almost anyone on the planet."  

"I really don't believe that you can be a good composer unless your music has a very strong, harmonic...let's say 'profile'. The problem is that harmony is not taught seriously anymore. I sound like the sort of old guy I never wanted to be, but I look back on my life and realise I was lucky because my parents found a teacher who could teach harmony. He exposed me to harmonic practice, and then I studied with a student of Nadia Boulanger when I was in college so I've had this developed sense of harmonic awareness all my life."

It might be argued that Adams broke out of Minimalism partly through what has been described as 'hypermelody', a melodic line that, in certain works, began to float over the top over the mosaic of repeated motifs that you otherwise find in Minimalism. Critic, Paul Griffiths has said that, "The first movement of the Violin Concerto is a supreme example of this technique. Entering over rainbow staircases of arpeggios from the orchestra, the soloist begins with just one interval, a falling minor third (from E flat to C), and spins a line that goes on for almost a quarter hour with little interruption." Perhaps Adams' development of a sense of line was inherently American. 1988's The Wound Dresser uses a text by Walt Whitman set with a melodic straightforwardness learnt from songwriters like Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. I asked Adams about the artistic influence of America, a homeland he's paid tribute to in a number of works, such as  2003's My Father Knew Charles Ives (which apostrophises the musical heritage of the Northeast, Adams' boyhood stomping ground) or The Dharma at Big Sur ('a concerto after Jack Kerouac').

Big Sur coastline, California. It's my own simplification perhaps, but I can't help strongly associating Adams with northern Californian landscapes. Released into the public domain by Calilover on Wikipedia

"Well, we're an intensely musical culture and part of the reason for that is the ethnic mix. I can't imagine how pale and uninteresting American music would be if it hadn't been for African-American culture. We've mixed it up in many ways. George Gershwin – a second-generation Russian Jew who absorbed all different kinds of vernacular music and particularly black music and created these masterpieces that we're so grateful for. And I think it's fair to say that I am conscious of what I'm doing when I incorporate elements of the music that's around me. But of course, I'm first and foremost a classical musician. City Noir is a good example of what I do. In a sense it's a symphony but informed with and full of my experiences with jazz and particularly jazz as it appears in the movies, circa 1940 and 50. I'll be doing a version of it in Melbourne which I think is very satisfying now."  

City Noir was partly inspired by Kevin Starr's 'Californian Dream' series of books, which cleverly convey the mood of the 'noir' period in Los Angeles' history when it was "a Front Page kind of city... a demimonde of rackets, screaming headlines, and politicians on the take; a town of gamblers, guys and dolls, booze and sex...Double Indemnity could have been set in Indianapolis, but it could not have had the same sense of evil beneath the sunny surface of palm-lined streets..."

Of course, John Adams is a good, solid New England name, the name of the US's second president in fact. And Adams had what might be considered a typical east coast Democrat's upbringing. Indeed he remembers shaking Candidate Kennedy's hand during the New Hampshire primaries in 1960. But he now lives in San Francisco and has written a piece about California's other city. I wondered to what extent people mightn't realise the enormous contribution that Los Angeles has made to music?

"Well, you know, I think California in general is very culturally rich area and the outside world tends to look at us as in a very hackneyed, prejudiced way. They look at Los Angeles as Walt Disney and Arnold Schwarzenegger and San Francisco as beatniks and the Golden Gate Bridge. It would be as if you thought of Paris only as the Eiffel Tower. Los Angeles is one of the most ethnically-rich urban environments in the world and it has a great history of the arts – wonderful patrons – and a great musical richness. And of course San Francisco has a very interesting history of the 1960s – Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead and then Allen Ginsberg and The Beat poets. So I think I've had a good time – not in every work – but occasionally in my works of placing myself in this culture and trying to make a musical evocation of it.

"You use an obbligato saxophone in City Noir.

"Well, you know, the saxophone doesn't get a lot of respect in the world of classical music and when it's used – which is quite rarely – it's usually for special effect. I've included saxophone in my pieces since Nixon in China in 1987 and I'm very used to the sound because I grew up listening to it. My father occasionally played it [he played in a swing band at the Winnipesaukee Gardens resort during the northeastern summers] and I myself actually played it but not very well. I wrote City Noir because I wanted to evoke that kind of nervous bebop sound that you occasionally heard in the background in film noir and so I wrote a virtuoso solo part in City Noir for alto saxophone and it sounds like it's being improvised but isn't. In fact, Tim McAllister played it so brilliantly [in the premiere performances] that I thought, gee maybe I should write a concerto for this guy because there aren't many good saxophone concertos.

"You’ve already written a violin concerto so you’ve got some experience in concerto form. Did you have to rethink it for saxophone?

"When I enter into a piece I don't have formal plans. Paul Hindemith said you should have everything already planned out before you've written the first note and I just think that's completely counter-intuitive for me. I look at composing as an adventure, like Magellan going out. I think there might be some continents out there but I don't know what they look like and I really launch an expedition, so the form usually ends up being the result of the materials that I’ve chosen."

Talk of the podium prompts me to ask Adams about his work as a conductor. The last time he went to Australia he was actually sitting in the audience listening, as Edo de Waart conducted his work.

"I've actually been conducting all of my professional life and way back in the 90s I had already conducted some of the great orchestras – Cleveland, Chicago, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. I try to control the amount of it each year because, not only does it take time away from my composing, but it also takes psychological energy. I have to become almost like a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When you're composing you're very inward and introverted and solitary and when you're conducting you have to be a very public person and outward. And that's why, when I read about Mahler I'm amazed that he could do both but I'm also aware of why people thought that he was a very difficult personality because it's a real challenge to move from one activity to the other. On the other hand, it's also tremendously fruitful for me, because not only am I able to polish my own pieces but when I do music that isn't my own I think I can bring a certain, perception to the performance of it."

Adams' music has often been inspired by big themes, orchestral works such as 2010's Absolute Jest may pay respect to masterworks of the European repertoire, the stage works cover the meeting of civilizations (Nixon in China), the creation of the Atomic Bomb (Dr. Atomic), several new takes on Christianity (El Niño, The Gospel According to the Other Mary)... I ask Adams what's next?

"I wish I could tell you. Every book I read, every story I encounter, I'm always kind of prospecting for a story because I think that, if people remember me in a hundred years, it'll be more for my stage works and my operatic works because they do really kind of put their finger on the pulse of our time, whether it's politics or nuclear war or terrorism...It's just very hard to find the right spin. It has to be, on the one hand, universal in its theme and yet at the same time something that can be localized in terms of the story into an extremely compact time and group of characters. I know I’ll find something but it's very frustrating not to have it right in front of me.

"I was very impressed that you'd read all those ‘California Dream’ books.

"Yeah, sometimes I think I read too much. I look around and think there are other things to do in life, but I was at a farmers' market you know, shopping for vegetables, and this guy had a T-shirt that said, 'Eat, Sleep, Read'."  

He laughs. It almost sounds like 'eat, sleep, read' is precisely what Adams wishes he could do now, but I know that pretty soon after I get off the phone he's going to "hunker down" (his agent's words) to write, something he'll be doing between this interview and preparing for a concert tour of Australia. I can kind of understand how he answered my question about Minimalism by saying that his music "moves so quickly that I don’t think it can be defined in any particular traditional terms".

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013


The repertoire for John Adams' concerts with the two Australian orchestras was:

Sydney
BEETHOVEN Fidelio Overture
ADAMS Violin Concerto (with Leila Josefowicz)
--
ADAMS Saxophone Concerto (world premiere, with Timothy McAllister)
RESPIGHI The Pines of Rome

Melbourne
ADAMS Short Ride in a Fast Machine
ADAMS Violin Concerto (with Leila Josefowicz)
--
ADAMS City Noir (Australian premiere, with Timothy McAllister)

Edited versions of this interview can be viewed at: sydneysymphony.com/program_library

and, for Melbourne, in "In Concert September" http://www.mso.com.au/your-visit/concert-programs/


If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2011/08/sousa-and-sioux-i-am-reminded.html

or,
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music, or is it drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], ideas for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012

On my website, click on "USA blog" to scroll down the full selection.

Compelled to enjoy freedom

When we went to vote at the Australian consulate in Century City the other day, the concierge downstairs asked what we thought it would be like if Americans were compelled to vote. I just said I thought there were advantages in not being able to opt out; in feeling you aren't leaving all the decisions in the hands of those who already have clout. (I once took the option of numbering all 230-odd boxes on an Upper House ballot paper and feel sure I'm one of those handful of voters who denied Pauline Hanson a seat in the NSW Legislative Council.)

But compulsory voting here would have a disturbing aspect. It's spectacularly easy here to not know what's going on. I get queries from friends back in Australia asking my views on things going on in US politics and I don't know what they're talking about. I haven't heard anything. Australians, I think, are much better informed about world events and that includes what's going on here. This is possibly a symptom of being so far off the main routes; Australians compensate by having a thirst for information. But I also think there's a very small and slight reason you wouldn't expect.

I don't watch much news in Australia. I don't buy a newspaper there either. But there are newsagencies everywhere - every mall, every shopping strip, street corner after street corner. And they have the day's headlines emblazoned on those sheets that the newsagent (yes, it's a job in Oz) places outfront in those wire frame thingys (technical name escapes me). You can't really walk down a street in Oz or stop at a traffic light or go to the fruit shop, butcher's or deli, without knowing the day's biggest news. It's in front of you; you don't have to have your cellphone on. This doesn't guarantee deeper thought or insight I know, it doesn't guard against people who think they have a right to their ignorant opinion, but it's a step toward a better-informed public. And, why would you want that? Hmmm, I don't often quote Thomas Jefferson, but...

"if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be."
       

Beethoven's Eighth

Continuing my series of program notes:

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No.8 in F, Op.93

Allegro vivace e con brio

Allegretto scherzando

Tempo di minuetto

Allegro vivace

This symphony was one of Beethoven’s own favourites. He described it affectionately as his ‘little’ symphony. Unfortunately, that description has led many listeners to regard it as slight. Actually, the work may be a listener’s best opportunity to get a comprehensive musical portrait of the composer. It is Beethoven’s most personal utterance, according to Sir George Grove in his book, Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. And it’s not just the popular stereotype of ‘Beethoven the thunderer’ we hear – although his forceful personality drives the workings-out of the first and last movements – it is Beethoven the rough humourist.

The Eighth is an example of the sort of pithy statement Beethoven could make when he worked quickly. Beethoven usually sketched his symphonies in the summer then wrote them up in detail, in the studio so to speak, during the winter and spring. But that doesn’t appear to have been the method this time. The Eighth was composed during the summer months of 1812, close upon the completion of Symphony No.7. The whole composition took only four months.

Beethoven spent the summer of 1812 travelling around the various mineral baths of Bohemia – from Teplitz to Karlsbad to Franzensbrunn and back to Karlsbad and Teplitz. 

A 19th century view of Teplitz by Lovro Janša

He was hoping to alleviate various stomach ailments by taking the waters, unsuccessfully as it turns out. There were various other disturbances in the composer’s life at the time. This was the period of his letter to the ‘Immortal Beloved’, an artefact of his unrequited love for a woman whose identity still eludes scholars. And he was, as always, struggling with money. The value of his annuity from Archduke Rudolph, Prince Lobkowitz and Count Kinsky had shrunk due to devaluation of the Austrian currency.

At Teplitz, Beethoven met the great poet and playwright, Goethe, for whose play, Egmont, he had provided incidental music in 1810. Goethe’s diary notes the 19, 20, 21 and 23 July as occasions on which they met. But Goethe’s overall impression of Beethoven could be distilled in one word. He is ‘uncontrolled’ (ungebändigt) he wrote to the songwriter, Carl Zelter, on 2 September 1812. Notwithstanding the fact that Goethe noted that Beethoven played for them (‘beautifully’) on 21 July, he was shocked by Beethoven’s personal behaviour. Much of Vienna’s aristocracy was present at Teplitz that summer, all anxious about Napoleon’s latest exploit: his foray into Russia. Beethoven deliberately snubbed the Austrian royal family in front of Goethe who had stood to one side and bowed as they passed. ‘Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming in a poet’, said Beethoven. Of course, we might agree; Beethoven and Goethe are better remembered these days. But that didn’t make Goethe feel any better about Beethoven’s behaviour.

Beethoven snubs the Austrian royal family; Goethe bows as they pass

Yet this work gives the lie to any perception that Beethoven was ‘uncontrolled’ in his musical mind. It is probably more important to note that Beethoven the composer was able to master violent contradictory impulses in this music. Goethe’s ‘ungebändigt’ refers, of course, to Beethoven’s personality. But it is also true that Goethe would probably not have recognised the immense control Beethoven exercised in controlling his violent musical impulses. This symphony is arguably Beethoven’s most disciplined. Its containment of jokes and distortions within the prevailing classical style reveals immense intellectual power.

The symphony begins with a phrase that sounds like the posing of a rhetorical question and its various answers. A consequent development in a series of long notes could be considered deepening of the subject matter except that it goes on so long you wonder if Beethoven is pulling our legs. And then the music peters out in staccato leaps leaving the solo bassoon exposed just prior to the second subject. All jokes aside, the development almost rises to the intense heights of some of Beethoven’s longer first movements. There is dissonant drama, fugal intensity, dizzying displacement of metre, a whiff of victory...Then the sustained notes from the exposition return. We hear the petering-out prior to the return of the ‘second subject’. But are we already in the recapitatulation? We haven’t heard the return of the first subject yet! Yes, we have: disguised as development. Beethoven has played expertly with classical sonata form in this first movement, and it ends pertly with an exact repetition of the symphony’s opening phrase: a neat punchline.

Perhaps the genuine novelty in this symphony is the second movement. Not a typical slow movement, it has almost a ‘comic opera’ feel. The ‘tock-tock-tock’ woodwind accompaniment to the opening theme was said to have been inspired by a new time-keeping instrument, Mälzel’s chronometer.

It was Beethoven who had pioneered the replacement of the standard third-movement minuet and trio with the scherzo and trio in his Second Symphony. Such was the Allegretto scherzando’s level of whimsy here, however, that Beethoven reverted to a minuet and trio – albeit a robust one - for this work.

The final movement is a sonata rondo, but once again Beethoven is not content to work safely within a standard form. The movement makes its way to the end via the expedient of a march – joking? Or intensifying the form?

In October 1812, Beethoven left the spas and moved on to Linz. There he finished this work, but his real purpose in travelling south was to intervene in his brother’s personal life. Beethoven was scandalised by the fact that his brother was living ‘in sin’ with his housekeeper, Therese Obermeyer; he took unjustified steps to put an end to it; the brothers came to blows. We have already noted Goethe’s judgement of Beethoven as ‘uncontrolled’. At least he was disciplined in the music, and, as Goethe concedes, his playing was ‘beautiful’.

The Eighth premiered 27 Feb 1814 in a concert which saw repeats of the Symphony No.7 and Wellington’s Victory, a display piece Beethoven had originally written for another of Mälzels inventions, the panharmonicum. In Beethoven’s day, the Seventh Symphony was much admired, and Wellington’s Victory (celebrating the defeat of Napoleon) made quite a splash. But Beethoven’s ‘kleine’ symphony deserved, and still deserves, more appreciation.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2011

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published 


 

Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" (extracts)

Continuing my series of program notes:

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Der Rosenkavalier, Op.59 – extracts

Der Rosenkavalier was the fifth of Richard Strauss’ operas, the second written in collaboration with librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The title (The Knight of the Rose) derives from a bit of stage business (purported to be an 18^th century custom, but invented by Hofmannsthal) whereby a knighted emissary presents a silver rose to a woman on behalf of her suitor. 

Robert Sterl's 1912 painting of Ernst von Schuch conducting Der Rosenkavalier

When it first appeared, Der Rosenkavalier was seen by many critics as a retreat from the atonal modernism of Strauss’s two immediately previous stage works – Salome and Elektra. Strauss had wanted to write a ‘Mozartian opera’ after Elektra, but Der Rosenkavalier has a sumptuousness which exceeds classicism. Its plot possesses some similarities with The Marriage of Figaro, but this ‘comedy for music’ is elevated by character portraiture that has rarely been surpassed in opera. It remains Strauss’ most popular, indeed best-loved, work.

Set in Vienna in 1740, Der Rosenkavalier, tells how the 17 year-old Octavian outwits the bullish Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau in his quest for the hand of the young convent girl, Sophie. But that is not all: it is a story of the magic of love at first sight; of nostalgia, self-sacrifice and the passing of time. Octavian, the ‘Knight’, first lays eyes on Sophie during the presentation of the Rose. Strauss’s orchestra wonderfully expresses the slow-motion intoxication of the moment. Octavian must first be given up by his older lover, the Feldmarschallin, Marie-Thérèse, who has known all along, somewhere inside, that one day he would fall for someone his own age, and whose realisation accounts for the change in the first act from amorous enthusiasm to mood of regret, and whose proud surrender is the background for the glorious Trio which climaxes the opera.
Strauss’ score retains a Mozartian level of beauty throughout (not even compromised by scenes of raw burlesque such as the stage-managed outwitting of Ochs in the Third Act). The ‘Viennese waltzes’, though anachronistic, are of such quality that, by this opera alone, Richard Strauss could almost challenge his unrelated namesake for the title of ‘Waltz King’.
Tonight’s extracts revolve around the three main characters – the Feldmarschallin, Octavian (sung by a soprano) and Sophie. During the orchestral introduction we can imagine the passionate love of Octavian and the Feldmarschallin between the sheets. The curtain rises. There is some minor bickering as when Octavian leaves his sword where Mahomet, the Feldmarschallin’s pageboy, might see it when he brings in her morning chocolate, but the big rift is yet to happen. They are still calling each other: ‘Mein Schatz!’ and ‘Mein Bub!’ After the Marschallin’s morning levée after everyone has left, including Ochs (‘der aufgeblasne, schlechte Kerl’), the Marschallin realises that she is growing older, and she tells Octavian that sooner or later (‘heut oder morgen’) he will leave her for a woman his own age. Vehemently denying it, he leaves in a huff. But Ochs and the Marschallin have arranged for Octavian to present the silver rose to Ochs’ fiancée, Sophie. Almost as if fated, he and Sophie fall in love. After the predatory Ochs has been driven off, Octavian finds himself face to face with the Marschallin who sees immediately that he has transferred his affections. She releases him to love the girl she said he would find ‘heut oder morgen’, and Octavian and Sophie express their disbelief at what has happened so quickly in ‘Ist ein Traum’. The Marschallin takes her leave, but Mahomet comes in once last time to collect the handkerchief she has left behind.

G.K. Williams © 2011

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013

A bit of drama

I loved this article by Hugh Laurie on what he likes about Los Angeles. He shares a lot of my enthusiasm.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/losangeles/10260419/Hugh-Lauries-Los-Angeles.html


But I guess I shouldn't be too Pollyanna-ish.

Today as I walking past the local high school I noticed three police cars parked outside the school. They were in a formation (two parallel either side of the entrance arches, one perpendicular on the kerb) which suggested regular attendance at hometime.

And then, the other day I saw this:

Curfew sign, LA

I don't recall seeing anything like this in benign Australia (perhaps the prohibition on liquor signs or anti liquor trafficking signs in Central Australia are closest). On the other hand, these are among the features that give this city its friction and intruiguing drama.

Christopher Rouse's "Der gerettete Alberich"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Christopher Rouse (born 1949)

Der gerettete Alberich – fantasy for percussionist and orchestra (1997)

At the end of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s ‘Ring cycle’, Brünnhilde has ridden her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Valhalla has burned to the ground killing the gods and the Rhine has flooded the world, leaving the earth ripe for renewal. But what has happened to Alberich, the Nibelung-king, who set the chain of destruction in motion by cursing the ring? Wagner doesn’t say. Is he free to wreak havoc all over again?

Arthur Rackham's illustration of Alberich driving the Nibelungs

This is the question that inspired Christopher Rouse when he composed Der gerettete Alberich. What you have here is part-concerto. Composed for Evelyn Glennie, the work demands the soloist’s skill on a different set of percussion instruments in each movement – guiros and a bank of bongos, wood blocks, and other drums in the first; marimba and steel pan in the second; drum kit in the third. But the work is also programmatic. The title can be translated into English as ‘Alberich Saved’ and critic Colin Anderson has outlined the three movements in terms of ‘Alberich plotting his nefarious schemes, then reflecting on his mis-spent and, in some ways, tragic life, and then...on the rampage to once again seek the ring of power to make him lord of the world’.  Rouse himself has described the work as ‘more of a fantasy for solo percussionist and orchestra’. But it’s also ‘a fantasy...on themes of Wagner’.

Use of quotation is nothing new in Rouse’s work – his Symphony No.1 incorporated the Adagio from Bruckner’s Symphony No.7; the Trombone Concerto cited music of Leonard Bernstein who had recently died. But Rouse’s use of quotation is not gimmickry. Rather it is a Mahlerian embrace of the world. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed has spoken of Rouse incorporating ‘ uncontrived, the range of the musical experience typical of his generation’, and this includes Rock ‘n Roll, which no doubt inspired ‘Alberich’’s drum kit workout at the beginning of movement three.

You can cite impressive facts about Rouse. He’s currently the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his Trombone Concerto and has won a Grammy Award for his Guitar Concerto, Concert de Gaudi (2002). What is perhaps more impressive is the genuine emotional experience he can provide to an audience. Early works could be speedy and harrowing; a change of direction saw him master the slow movement. Many listeners have remarked on a darkness in Rouse’s vision. The last page of his Symphony No.1 carries the inscription ‘de profundis clamavi’ (From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord). But works from the late 1990s marked a ‘look towards the light’. Der gerettete Alberich could be thought to straddle both dark and light visions.

The work opens with the closing bars of Götterdämmerung (the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif). Then Alberich insinuates his return on the guiro. This segues into music to which Alberich slipped on rocks at the bottom of the Rhine in Das Rheingold. The return of this motif later, after much development of themes, signals a kind of recapitulation. The second movement is one of Rouse’s ‘wondrous’ slow movements. The appropriateness of Alberich’s ‘Renunciation of Love’ motif, played by a forlorn solo oboe after a downward string glissando, is almost uncanny. The dawn music followed by the baleful pronouncement of the ‘Power of the Ring’ motif leads into the third movement which begins sounding almost like an American high school football marching band. In this movement ‘Alberich’ wreaks maximum havoc, most obviously in timpani and percussion cadenzas on the Nibelung motif. It’s terrifying but not without humour when you realise that Rouse has used the ‘Alberich turning himself into a serpent’ motif to wind up tension in the bass.

It is marvellous the way Rouse weaves Alberich-related motives from Wagner’s masterwork into his own composition. But the work is not really an excuse to play ‘spot the quote’ (although you get the impression Rouse would not begrudge any audience that fun). It’s probably enough to acknowledge that this work exemplifies Rouse’s music as some of the most compelling, enjoyable and satisfying around today and that Der gerettete Alberich is a spectacular showcase for a percussion soloist.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013 
Wagner's  Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013