San Francisco Classical Voice

John Adams

Friday's San Francisco Symphony concert, an uneasy mix of old and new music, seemed to present a melange of messages to the audience. We learned (once again) that the Symphony Chorus is excellent; that even Beethoven occasionally wrote embarrasingly banal music; that Emanuel Ax can play the piano about as well as anyone alive. Along the way we learned incidentally that new music can be fun but also sometimes overmatch even the Symphony.

The real event was the first performances of John Adams' new piano concerto, "Century Rolls," commissioned and premiered by Emanuel Ax. Adams explains that the title refers to the piano rolls (performances recorded on reproducing, or player, pianos) left by the great pianists--classical, jazz, and ragtime alike--of the early twentieth century. The concerto draws on the various styles of music thus recorded, but also on the very sound of music filtered through mechanism. "I took that sensation of how music sounds when it's played through the medium of the piano roll as a kind of sonic image," the composer writes, while adding that of course the performance itself should not sound mechanical, "but rather energized, precise, and brilliant."

There are places in the new concerto where Adams' skill in capturing "that sensation" is really uncanny. The slow central movement (titled "Manny's Gym," partially in reference to Satie's "Gymnopédies") is full of piano arabesques, repetitive yet slowly mutating, which somehow sound not exactly like improvisation, but rather like the frozen and slightly stilted record of improvisation. In the outer movements, the referencing is more oblique, in that the material itself is more active and so seems more immediate. Yet the recurrent "hitches" in the rhythmic flow in both movements also suggest the vagaries and fallibilities of mechanical reproduction.

Emanuel Ax's playing of the work he engendered was a marvel. Brilliant without "flash," sonorous without clangor, he tackled a solo part that may well have been awkward (Adams confesses that he is not a pianist) with an ease bordering on insouciance. The rhythmic intricacy of the music clearly delighted him. Under his fingers, every figure sprang forth with a sort of joyous energy, and the concerto's daunting succession of mixed meters positively swang where he held sway.

The same was not true, alas, for the orchestra. Guest concertmaster Michael Ludwig (whose forceful leadership was a pleasure to watch throughout the evening) seemed to have gotten inside Adams' rhythms, but not so the rest of the violins. They confined their attention to playing the right notes at the right time with a sort of sullen determination. Among the strings, only the cellos and basses (especially) seemed to be having some fun and managed to swing. The other sections of the orchestra seemed to have a better idea what was going on (the brass threw a veritable party in the finale, "Hail Bop!"). Even so, ensemble in many places was distressingly ragged.

It is an open question whether a work such as this one can be performed well at all under modern budgetary constraints. There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of contemporary orchestral works. Some are actually rather easy to play, but designed to sound difficult. Others are difficult and meant to sound so; most contemporary music is like this.

But a third group of pieces affects a surface ease that conceals hideous technical difficulties. Minimalism and its offshoots are the most obvious examples. The shifting ostinatos of Philip Glass and the slowly undulating harmonies of Henryk Górecki are effects easy on the ear, but purchased at the cost of enormous concentration (and, sometimes, physical pain) from the musicians. Players long acquainted with such music, steeped in it, can perform it with some measure of ease. Those unaccustomed to it might be forgiven for rankling at its gigantic, but hidden, demands.

So with "Century Rolls." Adams' marvelously active, evolving, percolating textures are a delight to the ear, but they cannot be much of a delight to play--at least on the slim rehearsal schedule the Symphony was presumably allotted. It's not that playing Adams can't be fun--clearly it can (witness Ax). It's that trying to provide fun while you are yourself sweating blood attempting to keep your place in that rhythmic maelstrom can be a trial. There was an almost obligatory, sweeping standing ovation for the composer after the concerto. I wonder whether the orchestra would voluntarily have joined in.

Choral works of Beethoven framed the Adams on either side. The concert opened with three short accompanied choruses. The "Elegischer Gesang" ("Elegiac Song"), a hushed meditation in E major not unlike the remote and serene slow movement of Beethoven's E-minor string quartet, received a rapt performance with exceptionally beautiful pianissimo string playing. The performance was marred only by several choral entrances that took half a second or so to reach a consensus pitch. Later came a setting of Goethe's "Meerestille und glückliche Fahrt" ("Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage"), a terrifying depiction of becalmed seas followed by a vivid impression of the wind starting up and, afterwards, just a few minutes too many of exuberant rejoicing.

In between the two came a "Bonding Song" ("Bundeslied") that would be a strong contender in any search for the single goofiest work of a major composer. A beery hymn to brotherhood and alcohol, not necessarily in that order, it ran through five verses of text to almost identical music (men and women alternating in the lead position), with a bumptious and wheezy accompaniment of a few winds.

The Mass in C Major, Op. 86, closed the program. The piece oscillates between two worlds, at one moment seeming to belong comfortably to the tradition of Haydn's late masses (written for the same patron, Nicholas Eszterházy), at the next breaking out in some extravagant word-emphasis or grotesquerie of harmony. Tilson Thomas's performance stressed the latter aspect, sometimes bordering on the crude; at "Qui sedes" in the Credo, the work threatened to turn into a tympani concerto. Still, it was a powerful, and powerfully effective rendition, firmly and intelligently shaped. The strong solo quartet was a definite asset, achieving a good blend in ensembles. The soloists made strong individual impressions as well, although tenor Anthony Dean Griffey sometimes succumbed to the "swooping disease" common to tenors. The others were Janice Watson, soprano, Theodora Hanslowe, mezzo-soprano, and Richard Zeller, baritone.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1998 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved