John Adams: Harmonielehre

“The music is played with huge élan by the RSNO...The results are highly charged and exciting performances of three works that place Adams at the very forefront of American contemporary classical music and deservedly so.” --MusicWeb International, 18th December 2013

“the RSNO under Peter Oundjian manage very effectively to project this single sweep of sound from beginning to end. Brass and percussion stand out for all the right reasons...but it's really a sense of collective unity imparted by the orchestra during the loud sections that is most impressive.” --Gramophone Magazine, February 2014

In this new release Peter Oundjian and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tackle two seminal works by the American composer John Adams. Harmonielehre, a symphony in all but name, is an expansive, richly expressive, and often breathtaking work. It takes its title from a 1911 text by Arnold Schoenberg on harmonic theory and evokes the lush soundworld of that composer’s early tonal period. Also heard throughout the score are echoes of Mahler, Wagner, Strauss, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. The piece also takes inspiration from some of Adams’s own strange and surreal dreams. The Doctor Atomic Symphony, based on Adams’s controversial opera Doctor Atomic, focuses on the character of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as preparations are made for the first test of the atomic bomb.

Although played without a break, the symphony falls into three distinct sections: ‘The Laboratory’, ‘Panic’, and ‘Trinity’. The symphony’s concluding section takes its title from the name given to the bomb test site by Oppenheimer himself, with reference to a deeply spiritual John Donne sonnet. This poem is set to music at the end of Act I of the opera and here in the symphony the aria’s intense vocal line is performed by solo trumpet. Also featured on the disc is John Adams’s energetic fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

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Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Famous particularly for his operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer , John Adams has become a leading figure among those composers inspired by the pioneers of musical minimalism. Davis Lang is concerned with further exploration of minimalism and ‘how you solve the language and structure problems that minimalism tries to avoid’. Lang has acted as a focal point for the latest developments in the downtown New York musical scene.

A persistent woodblock ostinato generates both the rhythm and the wild manner of Adam’s four-minute composition, Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986). The composer explains the work’s title: ‘You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” Originally written for large orchestra, the piece is here performed in Lawrence T Odorn’s transcription for band.

Lang’s Are You Experienced? (1990) draws its inspiration from the song (and Album) of the same name by Jimi Hendrix. It takes an instrumental line-up familiar in new music – single woodwind, brass and strings (though no violins), electric guitar, keyboard and synthesizer, perussion-and adds two unusual elements: a solo electric tuba, and a narrator (here the composer himself) who acts as a guide through the work.

In Lang’s Under Orpheus (1989-94) two pianos play single-note tremolos in the first of the composition’s two movements, and two-note tremolos in the second. In ‘Aria’, these instruments lead a pair of almost identical ensembles, mainly woodwind and brass players, which take up their own pianos’ pitches, sustaining and gradually extending them.
Adam’s Grand Pianola Music (1982), scored for two pianos, three sopranos and an ensemble of woodwind, brass and percussion, was inspired by that most American of modern icons, the automobile. The work brings minimalist repetition into a glorious alliance with various elements of the composer’s heritage – Beethoven, Rachmaninov, the American marching band and gospel music – and represents the emotional and parodistic aspects of Adam’s style at their most outrageous.

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