Returning to the Philharmonic for the first time in 20 years, John Adams led a thoughtfully curated program devoted largely to celebrating American rural and urban scapes.
Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, mourning the December 1976 death of Britten, whom Pärt admired for the ‘unusual purity of his music’, is scored for strings and a single chime. Adams elicited a poignant, well-shaped account with sensitive playing, each strike of the bell fractionally more insistent.
Gabriella Smith’s Lost Coast, composed for Gabriel Cabezas, was inspired by the composer’s 2014 backpacking trip on Northern California’s Lost Coast Trail. Introducing the piece, the composer’s love of nature and commitment to protecting the earth was manifest in her denouncement of ‘the criminally inadequate climate action from our leaders’. The score originated in 2021 as a two-movement duet for Cabezas and Smith herself manipulating an array of electronics including recordings of her singing various instrumental lines. Alongside the cello, this expanded 2023 treatment employs an orchestra plus a wide array of instruments, some unusual (metal water bottles, kitchen objects, tin cans and machine parts, etc.) to evoke the magnificence, terror, and freedom of the natural world. The piece opens with the soloist bowing tremolo on the discreetly amplified cello. The traditional and non-traditional instruments soon join in, producing a host of unconventional sounds – clangs, whooshes, and scrapings from percussion; wails and groans from strings; growls and rasps from woodwinds; roars and drones from brass – while the cellist draws on a range of novel techniques – tapping the strings with his fingertips and freely scuttering up and down the fingerboard – all skillfully coordinated by Adams. The music becomes increasingly chaotic and violent, suggesting both the unpredictability of nature and the chaos of humans’ interaction with the climate system. The Philharmonic players were at their most alert, conveying the wonder and joy of Nature, as well as the fear and loss caused by climate change.
Copland’s Quiet City is an extraordinarily intense evocation of the feelings of loneliness one might feel on a deserted city street after hours. This performance featured two Philharmonic principals. Adams shaped a haunting cityscape against which Christopher Martin’s silvery toned, eloquently plaintive instrument stood out, with Ryan Roberts as a more subdued but equally eloquent partner in a fervent dialogue.
Adams writes that his jazz-tinged City Noir was inspired by Kevin Starr’s books on California history, in particular a chapter chronicling the 1940s and ‘50s as reflected in the sensational journalism and noir films of that era. The 35-minute score, heavily suffused with echoes of American symphonic music of the early- to mid-20th century, has three movements. ‘The City and Its Double’, the darkly brooding first, opens with a mix of rumbling sounds and rhythmic fragments, out of which an agitated melody – featuring an alto saxophone, double bass and drums – emerges and builds to a frenetic ending. In the more introspective ‘The Song is For You’, the music is a slow-building strain on the alto sax, supported by muted tones and soft dynamics, creates a yearning, melancholic mood. ‘Boulevard Night’ captures the feeling of a bustling city street late at night, with its jerky rhythms and seductively undulating saxophone theme. Adams’s vigorous and disciplined conducting elicited an atmospheric and authoritative account of the vivid showpiece, while guest Timothy McAllister elegantly dispatched the sax solos.
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