Orchestra plays John Adams

Adams, Runnicles, Jansen:
Three reasons for hope in the classical world

DAN COREN

The opportunity to hear major works by Terry Riley and John Adams on consecutive nights may be a fairly commonplace event in New York or California, but I don’t remember anything quite like it before in Philadelphia. On Saturday April 21st, two days after the Kronos Quartet’s performance of Riley’s Sun Rings, I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the relatively unknown Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles, play Adams’s Harmonielehre, a three-movement symphony written more than 20 years ago.

The concert opened with a performance of the Bruch G minor Violin Concerto, performed by the 29-year-old Dutch violinist Janine Jansen. A coquettish photograph of Ms. Jansen has been smiling down from a billboard over I-95 for several weeks now, and, judging from the several suddenly empty seats in my row after the intermission, it seems that the packed house was there at least in part to hear or see her play.

That picture is as nothing compared to some of the photographs in Ms. Jansen’s website. Perhaps under the influence of Anne-Sophie Mutter (look at her site, too), it seems that when designing a website these days, one of the crucial decisions an aspiring young female violinist must make is how far she wants to go in emulating a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. One particular picture on Jansen’s site makes you think somebody said, “Hmmm … this picture is a bit cluttered, don’t you think? Let’s try getting rid of that damn violin.”

Jansen had completely enthralled David Patrick Stearns of the Inquirer on Friday (he lavished as much enthusiasm on this concert as he heaped scorn on Riley’s Sun Rings, and in this case I entirely agree with him), and indeed she played the Bruch with consummate musicianship. In person, Jansen exudes an ingénue-like innocence that completely belies her publicity shots. I kept feeling that I was watching a 1930s Hollywood comedy in which our young heroine wins out after many setbacks and romantic misunderstandings and, in her moment of triumph, gets to play with … the Philadelphia Orchestra!

Don’t write off those Minimalists

But I was there to hear the music of John Adams, the composer I still think of as the “young” Minimalist, even though he just turned 60.

I must admit that until recently I had written off the Minimalist movement, with its endless obsessively repetitious motives, as a one-trick pony. But one morning a few months ago, I tuned to the morning classical music show on Princeton’s WPRB (103.3 FM), that wonderful source of information about what the best and brightest of our country’s youth are thinking and listening to, and came in on the middle of a piece I hadn’t heard or thought about for many years. When the music ended, the announcer said that we’d just heard Philip Glass’s score for the 1982 experimental documentary movie, Koyaanisqatsi. A long pause followed, and then, with awe and reverence in her voice, she said, “That’s quite a piece!”

Yes, I thought, it most certainly is. Since then, I’ve tried to correct my grievous error in judgment, re-acquainting myself with and often hearing for the first time the music of Adams and Steve Reich.

Accomplishing the impossible

While Terry Riley’s Sun Rings looks back at another era (even though it was composed very recently), Harmonielehre is, despite having been written just a year or two after Koyaanisqatsi, a work that even today seems startlingly forward-looking and adventurous. (The title is a partly ironic, partly reverential reference to Arnold Schoenberg’s philosophical treatise on harmony.)

In Harmonielehre, Adams has done something that not long ago would have seemed impossible: In an idiom that is entirely original, he has restored the expressive power of major and minor triads. And like Music for 18 Musicians, an enormously influential work by Steve Reich (who the New Yorker’s Alex Ross has called the world’s greatest living composer), the Adam’s score pulsates with vital force from beginning to end. In witnessing a live performance, I had the impression that the Orchestra had become a collective ecosystem, like a coral reef, teeming with the minute details of self-perpetuating organic processes.

The climax of the gloriously dark, brooding second movement is, as Adams himself says, an explicit homage to the terrifying pile-up of thirds in the middle of the single movement of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. It works because Adams’s music is always on the edge of sounding like it might become something you’ve heard before– an echo of Sibelius here, of Alban Berg there– something you can’t quite place but that’s packed with dreamlike romantic yearning and significance, a combination of invigorating energy and continuous déja-vu.

A conductor resuscitates the Orchestra

Has anyone at the Orchestra considered trying to hire Donald Runnicles? This guy is the real deal. He conducted with clarity and discipline, and in playing for him the Orchestra musicians took on that eager look they get when they play for Simon Rattle.

At the concert’s end, the audience, to put it simply, went nuts. Runnicles asked separate soloists and groups to take bows. The percussion section took a bow. “Yay!” went one part of the audience. The brass. “Yayyyyyy!” went another. It was like being at a student performance, an impression enhanced by the all-of-a-sudden very youthful-looking orchestra.

It hardly needs to be reiterated that we live in hard times, beset by increasingly intractable societal ills. At least the health of American music, in practically any genre you name, is not something we need to worry about.



To read a response, click here.
To read Tom Purdom's review of the concert, click here.