Adams: Violin Concerto

Interesting to notice that I haven't listened to any work by John Adams since I started this listening diary. I generally admire this composer. It's his protean personality, his inspired mashing and hacking of genres and conventions that makes it worthwhile to keep tabs on his ever growing catalogue of works.

With his Violon Concerto (1993) Adams starts from the conventional tripartite structure of a concerto but he avoids the traditional opposition between soloist and orchestra. There is no genuine sense of development and no conflict. I'd characterise it rather as some sort of meditation or 'reverie'. In that sense the work, despite its classical garb, seems to betray Adams' minimalist roots.

The opening movement - crotchet = 76 - starts in medias res with the orchestra and violin enmeshed in a relentless, uncomfortable gyrating motion. It sounds like some stern disciplinary exercise. The weird harmonies remind us of whirling dervishes. Amazingly, Adams does not depart from this basic configuration as the movement unfolds. The pulse does not change and the violin leads the dance without ever for a second letting up. However, within these rather stringent limits the soloist deploys a startling sequence of increasingly adventurous and frenzied variations. The movement ends in a stupor of exhaustion, with the shortest of cadenzas. This leads into the second movement, suggestively titled Body through which the dream flows after a poem by Robert Hass. Adams at one point suggested that this image applied to the concerto as a whole: "The orchestra [is treated] as the organized, delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues and bones; the violin as the dream that flows through it." It is a rapt 'space music', in the form of a loose chaconne. The violin sings thoughtfully above a dark orchestral fabric, artfully embroidered with discreet synthesiser lines, woodwind filigree and suggestive percussive details. It's a most delicate mood study, recasting the pastoral bliss of, say, Appalachian Spring into a more exotic and cosmopolitan idiom. The third and final movement is a tongue-in-cheeck departure from the otherworldly atmosphere that held us in thrall. It's a kinetic, brash toccata that connects directly to Adams' fondness for classic Americana and Hollywood enchantments.

Adams' piece strikes a very different posture from the narrative, epic Schuman and Rochberg concertos. Continuity and connection rather than contrast and conflict are the watch words. The omnipresent solo voice gives the piece a very particular, almost prophetic cachet. It's a very significant and distinctive piece. Altogether these three concertos form an impressive American tryptich.

The Nonesuch recording I've listened to is very good. In terms of sound quality, Nonesuch is always on the dry side. So here as elsewhere I'm wishing for more bloom and somewhat more vigorous dynamics. The performance by Gidon Kremer backed up by Nagano and the LSO can be recommended on all accounts. It's superb.

Here's Robert Hass' poem:

You count up everything you have
or have let go.
What’s left is the lost and the possible.
To the lost, the irretrievable
or just out of reach, you say:
light loved the pier, the seedy
string quartet of the sun going down over water
that gilds ants and beach fleas
ecstatic and communal on the stiffened body
of a dead grebe washed ashore
by last night’s storm. Idiot sorrow,
an irregular splendor, is the half sister
of these considerations.
To the possible you say nothing.
October on the planet.
Huge moon, bright stars.