John ADAMS (b. 1947)
The John Adams Album
Common Tones in Simple Time (1980) [20:48]
Harmonielehre (1985) [43:04]
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986) [4:09]
Orchestre symphonique de Montréal/Kent Nagano
rec. live, 1, 2 & 4 November 2017, Maison symphonique de Montréal
DECCA 483 4938 [68:01]
When I sat down to type this review, I looked at the very small print in the booklet and discovered that, by sheer coincidence, it was two years to the day since the third of the concerts from which these live recordings derive.
Kent Nagano has “form” in the music of John Adams. He conducted the world premiere of El Niño, which was released on DVD by Arthaus Musik (review). I also have his performance in a studio recording that Nonesuch released on CD (7559-79634-2). He was responsible for anther Adams premiere on disc: El Dorado (1991), which he recorded with the Hallé in 1993 (Nonesuch 7559-79359-2). He also conducted the Violin Concerto for Gidon Kremer (Nonesuch 7559-79360-2) and I see that my colleague, Dominy Clements, reviewing another recording of that work, declared a preference for the Kremer/Nagano version. So, Nagano comes with strong credentials to this latest assignment in which he’s conducting the orchestra of which he’s been musical director since 2006.
First up is Common Tones in Simple Time. This was Adams’ first work for orchestra and it’s a most interesting composition. It’s definitely a minimalist piece and in Guy Marchand’s notes we find a quotation from the composer in which he speaks of the “slow and almost effortless feeling of harmonic evolution” in the piece. The constantly changing and evolving rhythmic patterns in the music are intriguing and very clever. Furthermore, the surface hyperactivity makes the listener almost unaware that underneath all that busy writing, which at times sounds like a Gamelan, the harmonies are developing at a much slower pace. I re-read the notes by the late Michael Steinberg for the 1986 recording by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony in which he quotes Adams’ view of the piece as “a pastorale with pulse”. That’s an interesting thought and it fits both the music and this Nagano performance well. Incidentally, that excellent de Waart recording (Nonesuch 9 79144-2) is still very competitive, though its rather closer sound, though good, must yield to Nagano’s modern Decca sound. Kent Nagano’s performance is very good indeed and I admired the great precision and attention to detail by the Montreal musicians.
People who are familiar with John Adams’ more recent music will clearly recognise, though, that he has come a long way since Common Tones in Simple Time. Indeed, we can hear that progression already in Harmonielehre which came along only five years later. This is a hugely ambitious score; in effect, it’s a three-movement symphony. It’s all the more impressive when one reads of the background to the work. That’s outlined by the composer himself in the booklet for Edo de Waart’s 1985 premiere recording with the San Francisco Symphony (Nonesuch 7559-79115-2). The work was commissioned by de Waart and when the commission came along it was a bad time for Adams. As he relates, the score “was created after a terribly frustrating fallow period, during which I composed every day for a year and nothing worthwhile came out of it.” He recalls sitting down at the piano one day and hammering out those grinding E minor chords with which the work opens. He doesn’t say explicitly if bashing out those chords was a gesture of frustration but it seems to have set him on his way and the score took only some three months to write.
Nagano paces the opening few minutes of the work a little more steadily than either de Waart or Peter Oundjian on a recent Chandos disc (review). I don’t mind that; there’s still purpose in the performance and Nagano, in alliance with his engineers, achieves fine clarity in the often-busy textures. Incidentally, though the SACD sound on Oundjian’s Chandos disc is impressive, the Decca engineers need not fear the comparison. There are no tunes as such in Common Tones in Simple Time but it’s not all that long before we realise that Harmonielehre is going to be rather different. At 6:33 into the first of the three movements the strings, sometimes doubled by other instruments, begin a long-breathed, yearning melody which runs right the way though to 8:35. This heralds a substantial episode which will be dominated by extended melodies which to my ears have a distinctly Mahlerian feel to them. If there were any doubts as to Adams’ tonal credentials, this section, which runs until around 14:30, ought to quell them. Thereafter, the rhythmic activity picks up and the music has much greater drive and intensity until Adams brings matters to a close with a re-visitation of the opening E minor chords. He has covered a huge amount of musical ground in the first movement and yet the work as a whole is less than half way through.
The second movement bears the title ‘The Amfortas Wound’ and the Wagnerian allusion is obvious. This movement is elegiac in tone and there are some notable contributions from the solo trumpet of Paul Merkelo (for example, from 3:56). The mood of the music becomes increasingly anguished until a huge climax is attained at around 8:30. The climax is intensified by piercing long trumpet notes which more than hint at the first movement climax of Mahler’s Tenth symphony. Indeed, throughout this movement I feel there’s a pronounced influence of Mahler in the contours of the melodies. This movement is a seriously impressive construct and it’s marvellously played by Nagano and his orchestra.
The final movement has the whacky title ‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’. The title is explained by a dream that Adams had in which he saw his young daughter, whose pet name was Quackie, perched on the shoulder of the medieval theologian, Meister Eckhardt as he floated through the skies. Make of that what you will. It has a berceuse-like opening which is very seductively voiced here. At 5:13 the pulse begins to quicken until the music reaches full speed around 7:10. Now we’re back in minimalist territory with repeated, sharply delineated rhythms and a good deal of very bright, treble-orientated orchestral textures. The music has great energy – as does this performance – and the excitement builds until the full orchestra is unleashed (10:18) for a loud and exhilarating conclusion.
Harmonielehre is a most impressive composition and, more than 30 years after it was completed, I think it remains one of Adams’ most important works. It clearly demonstrates his evolution into a composer for whom melody is a crucial element. Furthermore, though Common Tones in Simple Time was well imagined for orchestra, Harmonielehre represents a quantum leap forward. Adams writes for a huge orchestra with consummate assurance and the skill and invention of his scoring makes its maximum effect in this excellent and very well recorded performance. Edo de Waart’s recording is still required listening but Kent Nagano is an impressive rival.
He ends his programme with Adams’ most celebrated piece, Short Ride in a Fast Machine. This is four minutes or so of pure adrenalin rush for orchestra and Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal give an exhilarating account of it. I’m not sure that they quite match Edo de Waart’s performance, which is on the same disc as his recording of Common Tones in Simple Time, not least because the important bass drum contributions are a bit muffled in Montreal whereas in de Waart’s version the sound is loud and proud. One other small detail in Nagano’s performance puzzles me. Just before the end (3:48) he appears briefly to pull back the tempo somewhat, thereby reining in the progress of the Fast Machine. De Waart doesn’t do this, nor does Simon Rattle in his 1993 recording (review). It’s only a small detail but after I’d heard it once it became a bit of a distraction because I was waiting for it.
However, that small quibble shouldn’t detract from the excellence of this album. As I said at the outset, Kent Nagano came to this assignment with excellent credentials as an Adams interpreter; this CD burnishes those credentials further. The recording was engineered by Christopher Johns and he’s done a great job, providing sound that has impact and that lets you hear an abundance of detail, all of it in excellent perspectives. I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the booklet. The content seems fine but some design “genius” has decided that the texts should be printed in very small fonts and mostly in coloured type on differently coloured backgrounds. It was such a struggle to read that I gave up. This sort of mishmash shows no consideration for the people who actually buy the disc.
But if you do buy the disc, you’ll find that the booklet design is the only disappointing feature of an otherwise excellent John Adams album.
John Quinn
