First reviews of Adams’ third concerto for piano and orchestra are warmly receptive.
Gabe Meline on KQED: … After opening with cascading notes on harp and celeste reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score, Thursday’s world premiere at Davies Symphony Hall of After the Fall presented blissful, clustered melodies on the piano, and the type of sharp jabs that Ellington once delivered on his piano from the brass and woodwinds.
I’ve never thought of Adams’ music as film soundtrack fodder, but After the Fall is laden with imagery — fields, flight, turbulence, pursuit, heartbeat. The serene second movement is a slow float through mild gales of wind. To my liking, it could have been even more quiet, and Ólafsson’s touch lighter, leading up to a pivot in which the orchestra thunders in. More pianissimo beforehand would add contrast, instead of the passages Silly-Puttying into each other….
Lisa Hisch on San Francisco Classical Voice:
Like any great composer, John Adams tailors his concertos to the artistic personalities and musical strengths of the performers he’s working with. He composed his first full-scale piano concerto, Century Rolls, a charming extended riff on early 20th-century American musical styles, in 1997 for the genial Emanuel Ax. His second piano concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? written some 20 years later, embodies Yuja Wang’s extroverted flamboyance.
Luckily, we didn’t have to wait nearly as long for Adams’s third piano concerto, After the Fall. The San Francisco Symphony gave the world premiere of the work on Thursday, Jan. 16, at Davies Symphony Hall under the baton of guest conductor David Robertson.
The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, for whom the piece was written, has had great success performing Must the Devil (including in 2022 concerts with the Symphony). But he also spent the 2023–2024 season away from new music, playing only J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. After the Fall, which unfolds over about half an hour in three connected movements, is more introverted and austere than Must the Devil and consciously makes connections across the centuries between Adams and Bach.
The new concerto’s dreamy opening conjures up thoughts of other composers, however. Against hushed, sustained strings, the piano rises in counterpoint with a celesta and a pair of harps, recalling the beautiful transparency of Maurice Ravel’s orchestration and the moodiness of Béla Bartók’s night music. The sparse texture of the repeated rhythmic figurations does invoke Bach — though only Adams could have written the explosive, more densely orchestrated balance of the first movement….
Read on here.
The post John Adams’ new concerto lands gently and with grace appeared first on Slippedisc.
