John Adams: String-Driven Thing

According to the press release from Nonesuch, his record label, John Adams is America's most frequently programmed composer. Certainly Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, his two operatic collaborations with stage director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris, have been among the most visible of contemporary musical works. In both, Adams has attempted to go beyond the familiar minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich that he grew up in. But I've had mixed feelings about his work. His vocal music hasn't yet found a consistently convincing, flexible way of setting words. His latest stage work, a setting of poet June Jordan's multicultural soap opera, her so-called "earthquake/romance," I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, is based on another contemporary event: the Los Angeles earthquake. In Adams's mixture of Broadway, pop, rock, blues, and rap, words emerge more clearly, but the score never gets past its more authentic role models.

Last summer at Tanglewood, however, I heard a performance of his 1993 Violin Concerto, with Stefan Asbury leading Boston Symphony violinist Laura Park. Nonesuch has just released the concerto's premiere recording, with violinist Gidon Kremer and the London Symphony under Kent Nagano. I'm not sure this performance is quite as silky or mercurial as the one from Tanglewood; still, I continue to think that this might be Adams's very best piece. It begins with a murmuring orchestral backdrop, over which pieces of violin melody dip and soar, flutter and glide, like a hawk over quicksand.

The tolling second movement is a hypnotic Chaconne with its slowly pulsing continuously varied pattern of harmonies. The title of the movement, "Body through which the dream flows," comes from a line by poet laureate Robert Hass, and Adams calls it "an image for the entire concerto: the orchestra as the organized, delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues and bones; the violin as the dream that flows through it." This haunting movement, with its eerie synthesizer, dissolves into a non-stop "Toccare," a breathless hoedown that echoes -- maybe too closely for comfort -- the offbeat rhythms of the literally devilish fiddling in Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat.

There's almost no rest for the violinist, and Gidon Kremer makes the most of Adams's virtuosic demands. Kent Nagano and the London Symphony are superb. The Violin Concerto was a joint commission by two orchestras: the London Symphony and the Minneapolis Orchestra (which gave the world premiere in 1994, with its brilliant concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis and conductor Edo de Waart). A third commissioner was New York City Ballet, where it was choreographed by Peter Martins.

The dance impulse is evidently important for John Adams. One of the best things in Nixon in China was the dance music, some of which, under the title The Chairman Dances, he has turned into a successful concert piece. And Shaker Loops, his minimalist milestone for strings from 1983, was also in part inspired by the ecstatic dancing into which otherwise usually sober Shakers might occasionally burst. A definitive performance Adams himself conducted of that piece in 1988 with the Orchestra of St. Luke's fills out the new CD with the Violin Concerto. Although his music doesn't always sing when you wish it would, in his best pieces Adams can at least do some pretty fancy footwork.

-- Lloyd Schwartz