John Adams reviews

The music of Bali has long captured the imagination of Western composers. The whirling sound of gamelan – an ensemble comprised primarily of gongs and metallophones – has, since its arrival on European shores, inspired numerous works with its insistent rhythm and dizzying melodic patterns. This splendid disc offers three works which directly or indirectly owe something to Balinese gamelan.

‘Familiarity makes the heart grow fonder of John Adams’s third opera, and also more fearful of its almost unbearable tension in the musical countdown to the ‘two billion dollar experiment’ testing the atomic bomb in Los Alamos.’ 

John Adams

Doctor Atomic

Gerald Finley, Julia Bullock, Brindley Sherratt; BBC Singers; BBC Symphony Orchestra/John Adams

Nonesuch 7559793107   157:00 mins (2 discs)

Equalling the fabulous richness of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite is a tall order, but John Adams has a twist in mind: the brutal situation of the wife who staves off execution by telling her bloodthirsty husband the tales of 1001 nights still resonates today. So this Muslim woman is at the mercy of zealots and bigots who pursue her until the final, miraculous ‘sanctuary’: three of Adams’s finest minutes as the soloist soars above queasily shifting multipart strings.

The title is adapted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet but the skull examined in John Adams’s Absolute Jest is that of Beethoven. Here is wit, rough passion, gravity and playfulness; motifs from the Ninth Symphony; gestures inspired by the Seventh Symphony; chord progressions from the Waldstein Piano Sonata; thematic cells from the Op. 131 String Quartet in C sharp minor and the Grosse Fugue.

At first glance, this is an untypical addition to the Nonesuch Adams canon. It involves none of the orchestras which co-commissioned City Noir – Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were filmed performing the work for a Deutsche Grammophon DVD – and none of the usual conductors, John Adams himself included.

There is no overture to The Gospel According to the Other Mary, no chorus to set the scene. John Adams’s passion oratorio opens with a frenzied retort to the gentle lullaby that closes his nativity oratorio, El Niño. Taken from the autobiography of the social activist, Dorothy Day, Mary Magdalene’s words tumble thick and fast in an outraged first-person account of arrest, strip-search and imprisonment alongside a drug addict in violent withdrawal.

At the time of the Harmonielehre’s premiere in 1985, it already seemed clear that here was as near a great work as makes no difference. Today the immensity and mastery of John Adams’s three-movement symphonic conception just impresses all the more.

In person, John Adams is a slender man. In Son of Chamber Symphony (2009), he is a glutton. This feast of colours and textures for 16 players may bear a strong family resemblance to its knockabout predecessor, Chamber Symphony (1992), but Adams’s tastes have broadened. Where Chamber Symphony pitted Schoenberg against the kinetic scores of the Road Runner cartoons, Son of Chamber Symphony pops Beethoven, Ravel, Stanley Donen and Richard Nixon into a hot tub and plies them with tequila slammers.

It must bug John Adams that, 22 years after its Houston premiere, the opera that Peter Sellars dubbed ‘a grand divertissement for the Reagan administration’ is still described as his best. Nixon in China is the most conventional of Adams’s operas – an exhilarating confection of history and fantasy, with all the spectacle and cruelty an audience trained on Verdi might expect.

The Symphony draws material from Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, set in July 1945 during the hours immediately before the first atom bomb test. The doctor is Robert Oppenheimer, who, having led the Manhattan Project in developing the atom bomb, opposed the hydrogen bomb when he fully realised the dangers of radioactivity.

Although nothing is specified in the packaging or credits, the 50-minute ‘Portrait’ on this DVD has presumably been designed for showing on TV as an introduction to Channel 4’s film of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, due to be screened this month. The documentary features clips of the soundtrack being made in the recording studio and from the cruise-ship set in Malta.

To the casual listener, there are two John Adamses: one who engages with modern history – Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic – and one whose music expresses the great and small miracles of domestic life. Listen closer, and you realise that the personal and the political are inseparable. Presidents and terrorists alike have dreams and doubts, and the baby in El Niño is born into dispossession and poverty.