Limelight

 Michael Quinn

11.12.2022Review 

John Adams (Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Paavo Järvi)

The Swiss produce a superb 75th birthday celebration of an American great.

Editor's Choice - January 2023

by Michael Quinn on 11 December, 2022 ****

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John Adams’ recent spell as artist in residence with Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra and Paavo Järvi has resulted in a compact, concentrated disc that suggests there was a mutual meeting of musical minds during his tenure in the Swiss municipality.

With matter-of-fact directness, the disc is titled John Adams. And why not? Adams, who celebrated his 75th birthday earlier this year, has long earned his right to be his own best claim for attention. Despite its concision – only four works are featured; two of which take by far the lion’s share of the 54-minute playing time – or perhaps because of it, this authentically played compendium adroitly serves dual functions.

For those already familiar with the (once maverick, now mainstream) American’s European-influenced signature, it’s a vibrant reminder of Adams at his most idiosyncratic and incisive. For newcomers, it’s a perfect introduction to a composer constantly interrogating his inheritances from the Old and the New Worlds and seeking common ground between them.

Featured here are a quartet of defining works dating from 1985 to 2003. The most recent, the three-part My Father Knew Charles Ives, finds Adams situating himself at the very epicentre of 20th-century American musical modernism with a knowing tribute that unabashedly borrows (literally and figuratively) from his prescient, provocative predecessor. Adams pithily describes it as “a Proustian madeleine, although one with a Yankee flavour”.

It’s an essential, pivotal work in mapping Adams’ transformation from outlying rebel to committed participant and his quest to reconcile the West and the Wild West. Staunchly allying himself to his New England compatriot as he nails his flag to the mast, it filters the clashing, cacophonous marching bands of Ives through a less pugilistic, more considered reminiscence of their shared heritage.

Järvi and his Zurich players seem vividly, thrillingly, alive and alert to its nuance, emotion and idiomatic drama. Wonderfully muscular and testosterone-driven in the opening Concord, discreetly evocative and poetic in the middle-movement The Lake, they produce an epiphanic, poetic glow underpinned by granitic grandeur, in the concluding The Mountain.

The shorter but no less substantial Slonimsky’s Earbox is from 1995. A tribute to the Russian-Jewish composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, energised by Rite of Spring-era Stravinsky and accented by quixotic oriental, gamelan-like colours, it is treated to a whirlwind account as sure in its pulsating gradations and detailing as it is to its over-riding sense of indebtedness and poetry.

From the same year, the jaunty, rhythmically combustible Lollapalooza, written to celebrate the 40th birthday of conductor Simon Rattle, is more than mere homage. That’s something Järvi and the Tonhalle recognise and realise with muscular aplomb and especial kudos merited by the committed brass and percussion sections.
The earliest, and also shortest, work here is 1985’s Tromba Lontana, a miniature, fanfare lasting not much more than four minutes that is, with its obvious debt to Aaron Copland, meticulously textured and acutely realised with requisite gumption and grace.

Recorded in the orchestra’s home, the sound is excellent, even better, more revealing, on headphones. 

https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/john-adams-tonhalle-orchester-zurich-paavo-jarvi/