Showing posts with label John Adams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Adams. Show all posts

Monday, June 26, 2017

Man of the Golden West

John Adams. Photo: Vern Evans

John Adams has just turned 70. Everyone is celebrating. Everyone wants him to celebrate with them. So when is he supposed to compose? I caught him backstage during the Dr Atomic rehearsals at the Barbican a few months ago. In the resulting interview for Primephonic we talked about his forthcoming Gold Rush opera Girls of the Golden West, set in his home state of northern California, as well as nature versus nurture, the evolution of his style and the consistency of voice within that evolution - and why he feels like "a Soviet hack composer" compared to the music of his up-and-coming son, Samuel Adams.

.....Adams reflects that this “voice” could be determined as much by nature as nurture – a sort of musical DNA. “I suspect it’s almost genetic,” he comments. “If you look at Stravinsky, there’s such radical difference between the early music and the late music, yet there is some almost inexplicable identity that carries on. And I think certainly the rhythmic energy of my music and the particular harmonic language that I have comes through.  

“Once every couple of years I conduct Nixon in China [his opera of 1987] because I like it and it’s always a lot of fun. And I’m amazed how much of that opera is expressed in minimalist style, with these crazy, whimsical marriages with jazz and big-band music. I don’t compose in that style any more. But that sort of rhythmic impulse, which you also hear in the early piano music, is still there today.”

Evolution, he suggests, occurs thanks to the needs of the pieces. “Nixon is a much more consciously minimalist piece and I think that works for the certain ironic tone of the opera,” he says. “But starting with The Death of Klinghoffer, which I composed between 1990 and 91, I had to find a language that was more serious and not at all ironic. I think that was the big moment of expanding. 

“But I’m not a hidebound, by-the-rules kind of guy. I feel that every piece I compose needs its own special language – and that’s both the joy and the anguish, because you have to find out what and who it’s going to be.” ...

Read the whole thing here.


Wednesday, April 26, 2017

A nuclear bomb in the Barbican



How do you set an atomic bomb to music? To attempt it, you have to think big. Over the centuries, the greatest composers have arguably stood or fallen by their willingness to tackle the giant topics of their time, sometimes those of all time. Bach set the Crucifixion. Beethoven tackled liberty and fraternity. Wagner portrayed the end of the world and its rebirth. In Dr Atomic, John Adams has depicted a night that changed history forever, building up to the test of a nuclear bomb at Los Alamos and, at the last moment, fusing this event with the use of the "gadget" (as some of the characters call it) a few weeks later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Adams, currently circumnavigating the world for his 70th birthday celebrations, has been in London this week recording the opera with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, finishing with a sort-of-semi-staged concert last night at the Barbican. Although the work was done at ENO when brand new, it isn't performed live often and the chance to be fully immersed in its terrifying world and boundary-crunching approach is not to be missed.

It's a dark, desperate piece that, in exploring an incident that changed humankind into a species capable of destroying its own world, plunges deep into the impulses of the soul - and manipulates our sense of time while doing so. We become intensely aware of the beauty and wonder of the world, the sensuality of it heightened by the poetry selected by Peter Sellars for the libretto, while intensifying the consciousness of horrifying imminent destruction.

John Adams. Photo: Vern Evans
The drama is in many ways inward, as Oppenheimer - at first seemingly transfixed by scientific data and the prospect of a "brilliant luminescence" - then becomes increasingly tortured and implicitly terrified by what he has created. In concert, the effect is in some ways more that of an oratorio than an opera: the settings of poems by John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, Muriel Rukeyser and others offer moments of reflection on love, death, sensuality and beauty, set to music that ebbs and flows in waves of shimmering, multifaceted, orchestral gorgeousness, the voices often soaring across the top in widespread extended phrases that reach both stratospheres and profundities of range, often in quick succession.

The personal interactions could be seen as the equivalent of recitatives and are mostly discussions between the men: General Groves bullies Frank Hubbard to predict good weather for the test even though dangerous storms are taking place, and engages in a lighter-hearted exchange with Oppenheimer about diet [dang! I thought Roxanna and I were the first team to put chocolate brownies into an opera, but no...]. Ensembles are few, though mesmerising when they occur - Wilson's dream of falling from the bomb tower is a case in point. Choruses are illustrative, sometimes devastating - the vision of Vishnu in particular - and the chorus's role is to contextualise, comment and evoke, but not especially to be a human presence.

The overarching time-drama of the whole edifice, though, is not so much Bachian as Wagnerian. The entire three-or-so hours of music is a build-up of tension to the final event. In short, we are waiting for a nuclear bomb to explode. At the end, it does.

Along the way, we sense the shifting of history's tectonic plates - keening violins, shuddering double-basses, the inimitable threat from the bass clarinet, visionary swirls of harp, flashes of lightening from piccolo or trumpet, an extraordinary episode early in act II, brass-led, that builds upwards and outwards, transforming its harmonies continually like a passage Wagner forgot to write. And like the fall of Valhalla, like the death of Stravinsky's Chosen Maiden, the release of tension in the final cataclysm is a form of catharsis. In music, after all, these violent ends sometimes presage a renewal of hope. (Having so said, this opera is probably the scariest musical experience I've encountered since first hearing The Rite of Spring.)

Conducted by the composer himself, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played like people possessed, fully matched by the BBC Singers, sounding like an ensemble twice the actual size (they also put believable American twists into their diction). The soloists were pure gold: Gerald Finley, Adams's original, the powerful and vocally luminous Oppenheimer; Julia Bullock radiant and expressive as Kitty, relishing the sensual poetry of "fierce peace"; Jennifer Johnston a dark, aching Pasqualita. The subsidiary male roles were all characterful and persuasive: Brindley Sherratt a fine Teller, Andrew Staples touching as Wilson, Aubrey Allicock a General Groves one wouldn't want to come up against if one was a weather-forecaster, Marcus Farnsworth and Samuel Sakker excellent as Hubbard and Captain James Nolan.

Staging, handled sensitively by Kenneth Richardson, was necessarily limited as the orchestra is absolutely vast, with a heavy-duty, space-eating plethora of percussion; there's not much room to move, so most of the effect was achieved by costumes and lighting. But there's much that can be done with that: a blaze of red light as the explosion begins, the ensemble cover their eyes - then darkness. As the final recorded voice intones Japanese pleas for help, for water for the children, the orchestra switch off their lights one by one until nothing is left but a ground zero in the pitch-black soul of humanity itself.

One might have expected the standing ovation to continue for longer, but the impression was that much of the audience was seriously shaken up by the experience and probably wanted air, which was in short supply. But one overriding image? The bomb explodes; and the composer stands, measuring out the bars with his baton. Humanity can create the horrors of the atomic bomb. Humanity can also create the wonder of great music about giant topics. Adams has done so.

Monday, August 22, 2016

John Adams writes a Gold Rush opera


News from John Adams's website tells us that this much-loved American composer has been hard at work on his biggest creation since The Gospel According to the Other Mary. His new opera is called Girls of the Golden West - yes, really - and is to be premiered in San Francisco in, he says, November 2017. 

The libretto is by Peter Sellars and, like the pair's two previous works together - the Other Mary and Dr Atomic - is compiled out of original texts from a variety of sources, this time including chunks of Mark Twain's eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, letters, Gold Rush songs, political speeches, journals and a spot of Shakespeare. Set in the 1850s in mining camps in the Sierra mountains during the California Gold Rush, the story is a searing indictment of racism in American society of the time. It's violent, disturbing, tragic. But I can't help adoring the name of one central character, a Chinese prostitute called Ah Sing. 

Here's the full synopsis. Take a deep breath: it's strong stuff.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Mindblown.

John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary opened in its first-ever full staging at ENO last night. I was mesmerised and mind-blown. Here's  my review... 

There is something extraordinary about seeing a composer taking a bow for a really fantastic new(ish) piece in front of a standing ovation. It doesn't happen very often, and when it does, it's a privilege to be there.

Dear ENO, why, oh WHY were the dancers not honoured with biographies in the programmes? A lot of us are really cross about this. They were marvellous. They deserve equal billing.

Anyhow, go and see it. There are only 5 more performances. Book here.

And here's an introduction on film.



Friday, June 20, 2014

Organisations join forces to protest at the Met's 'Klinghoffer' decision

The National Coalition Against Censorshipthe National Opera AssociationArticle 19The Dramatists Legal Defense FundFree Expression Policy ProjectfreeDimensionalFreemuse, and PEN American Center have issued a statement opposing the Metropolitan Opera's cancellation of live HD simulcast of John Adams' opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, to about 2000 cinemas in 65 countries. They are urging the Met and its director, Peter Gelb, to reconsider that decision. According to Broadway World, further organisations are expected to join the protest. 

Ole Reitov, director of Freemuse, has commented (as quoted on Broadway World): "Whether self-censoring is motivated by pressure from corporate, social or political interests, cultural institutions should never forget, that once they accept such pressure they lose artistic credibility and signal lack of integrity."

The full statement from the NCAC is online here, but my computer is refusing to load it. I hope this is due to weight of traffic, and does not suggest some sort of online censorship of anti-censorship.

UPDATE, 22 June, 10.20am: If you only read one piece on this subject, make it this one, from a British-Israeli tenor who has sung in the opera:

http://singingentrepreneur.com/the-music-of-our-complexity/

Thursday, June 19, 2014

My take on the "Klinghoffer" debacle

How to turn a good contemporary opera into an eternal iconic masterpiece 101: suppress it. Comment piece now up on the Amati.com webzine.

UPDATE, 19 June 6.40pm: Please read, too, Anthony Tomaasini in the New York Times: What 'The Death of Klinghoffer' Could Have Accomplished.

UPDATE, 22 June, 10.20am: If you only read one piece on this subject, make it this one, from a British-Israeli tenor who has sung in the opera:
http://singingentrepreneur.com/the-music-of-our-complexity/

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

A chat with John Adams

My interview with the fabulous John Adams is in today's Independent. Read it here.

I wouldn't want to say this or that person is my favourite composer of today - there are so many, so different, so fascinating, so inspiring. But hey...

Obviously if you have time to talk to a composer like Adams, you don't want to chat for just ten minutes if you can help it, so below are some "bonus tracks", Qs and As that are not in the Indy piece.



JD: I was reading something in which you said you felt the medium of the orchestra has run its course. But together with Glass you’ve done so much to put contemporary music back at the heart of full scale, mainstream concert programmes - maybe it’s not dead after all?

JA: It’s hard to say. I have good days and bad days and on bad days I wake up feeling that what we’re doing in classical music is so barely on people’s radar that I can get very depressed. But there are a lot of poets and composers and novelists like Melville and Charles Ives who did not get much attention at all in their lifetime. We do what we do because we love it and we have a small audience that adores what we do - and over time it persists, while the other stuff is revealed to be rather ephemeral.

JD: Do you still compose nine to five?

JA: I do, yes. I never work at night. (JD: Is it a question of routine?) Yes, it’s routine – I don’t travel a huge amount, but I do a reasonable amount of conducting during the year and I’m not someone who can actually compose in a hotel room, I absolutely have to be home in my studio. So when I am home I’m very disciplined. I try to work every day and have certain hours. I think most composers are that way – it’s an extremely labour-intensive activity and you have to make all the decisions yourself, so most composers I know are basically very disciplined, hardworking people. 


JD: There’s still a common misapprehension that people stroll through art exhibitions or mountain scenery and have sudden strokes of inspiration... 


JA: That's just nothing. We’re not like that at all. I just read Amsterdam which has a composer as its main character and I very much enjoyed the book but I thought his view of a composer was much too romantic. We’re much duller than that! 

JD: Is there anything in particular that does get the creative juices flowing for you?



JA: I wish I knew! If I had a magic pill or a certain place to take a walk, maybe starting pieces wouldn’t be such agony. Beginning a piece is always just hell – even if I think know what I’ve got to do. For some strange reason once a piece finally gets lift-off, if I work every day I usually – it’s like being an athlete, you’re in shape and the genetic material of the piece gives birth to tissues and organs and muscles and skeletons. Being a composer is like being a gardener – you water, prune, encourage and cut back. I take a walk every day with my two dogs. Lately I’ve been taking my iPod and listening to audio books or music and I think I should just stop the chatter and go back to what I did as a kid, when every time I took a walk I imagined a new piece of music in great detail. I’ve sort of got lazy about that. Now I’m leaving my technology behind when I leave the house.

JD: Not that long ago John Berry at English National Opera gave a press conference where he said that he hoped you’d write your next opera for ENO. Can we hope that this will happen? Have you any more operas on the go? 

JA: ENO have been absolutely among my strongest supporters and I’m deeply grateful to them. They’re creative and they make things happen... I just haven’t found a story that rang my bells the way Nixon or Klinghoffer or Dr Atomic did. I’m sure it’ll happen soon. (JD: Would you look for a similar real life event to base it on?) I think that’s sort of what I do best. I don’t think I’m a Pélléas et Mélisande type of composer - I don’t think a story that is intimate is what I’m strongest at – but I think it’s best to stay loose and not make any predictions. 


JD: Do you think The Death of Klinghoffer has finally been accepted? 

JA: The Met is doing it soon [Tom Morris's production, already seen at ENO], so I think it’s possible that there’ll be some controversy, but I don’t think it’s going to be at the level it was in '91. The issue was that the people who got so upset didn’t actually know the opera! That was almost always the case... As far as I’m concerned, it was very painful years ago, but I think over time people have realized that the opera isn’t at all about what the controversy was about. Really it’s a tragedy and it's something for everyone, it's not just about Palestinians and not just about Jews. It’s for everyone, because that’s what’s happening in the world. But it’ll be interesting at the Met because everything that does is sort of widescreen, with lots of attention and lots of people weighing in. I hope it’ll be experienced as a work of humanity, not perceived as some sort of agit-prop. 


Sunday, February 26, 2012

Klinghoffer rings, clings and clangs

Yesterday was the opening night of The Death of Klinghoffer at English National Opera.

Rings: it's strong stuff, first of all. Tom Morris's staging is magnificent, overwhelming at times in the power of its imagery, dominated by the draining and dangerous Middle Eastern sun.

The concrete panels of that wall, the so-called "separation barrier" (it is a wall - I have touched the real thing), are present throughout. They not only provide the necessary claustrophobic resonances and contexts, but also form a screen for the film projections of the limestone hills, the rolling waves, and, for the finale of act 1, layer upon layer of graffiti. Some are grumbling that the wall wasn't there at the time of the Achille Lauro hijacking. The Death of Klinghoffer may have been written 20 years ago, but the issues are as current as ever and it would have been invidious for Morris to ignore how matters have progressed, or not progressed (those condemning the opera as anti-Zionist are in denial - this business is real and it won't conveniently vanish on demand). Besides, in certain ways Klinghoffer is very much an opera of its time - more of that later - and bringing it up to date for presentation now is an artistic necessity, even more than a political one.

Dance provides a marvellous opportunity to illuminate certain characters' inner feelings that might not otherwise emerge. Hats off to choreographer Arthur Pita, who has created a dance language that corresponds to the music, full of repeated fragments, patterns that build up associations, the physical depiction of the running and rerunning of memory and conflicted thought. Four men manoeuvre a figure representing Klinghoffer - perhaps the man he used to be in his youth? - while the wonderful Alan Opie (who has by then been killed) delivers the "aria of the falling body" against the backdrop of the terrible, hot sky. Omar, the terrorist who shoots Klinghoffer, is played by a dancer (Jesse Kovarsky) and says not a word: his fear and desperation are shown through his movements. As the British shipboard dancing girl (Kate Miller-Heidke) and her 1980s pop music remind us, it's the quiet ones you have to watch.

Michaela Martens as Marilyn Klinghoffer partners Alan Opie in performances of great dignity, honesty and vulnerability. Their plight brings home the essence of this history of macrocosm and microcosm: two innocent, normal people are caught up in something not of their making and out of their control, their lives shattered as a result. The opera, at its core, is about how ordinary people are destroyed by world events. It is always the innocent who pay the price.

Christopher Magiera is a fine and believable Captain, thinking on his feet, especially touching in the scene where Mamoud (the eloquent baritone Richard Burkhard), a dead ringer for Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, opens up overnight and tells him his own story - an incident based, like many of the opera's scenes, on the captain's memoirs, extracts of which you can read in the programme. Superb vignettes by Kathryn Harries as the Austrian woman who describes locking herself in her bathroom and escaping unnoticed, all of it a first-rate take-off of Pierrot Lunaire sprechstimme; and by Clare Presland as the Palestinian Woman, implicitly Omar's mother, intensity suffusing every blazing note.

It's a huge score, full of marvels, embroidered with sizzling colours and layer upon layer of musical cause and effect; the inspired and beautiful choruses and the reflective arias for the Klinghoffers are perhaps its finest moments. The ENO chorus did the former proud and the orchestra ran, so to speak, a tight ship under the expert captaincy of Baldur Bronnimann. Rarely can it have been made so clear that "minimalist" is a misleading misnomer. The music is almost Wagnerian at times, in that the real action takes place in unfolding of the orchestral fabric, the singers floating over the top.

And what clings is its atmosphere. The aura of the music captures the same atmosphere I experienced every day when I visited the West Bank two years ago. This is what you breathe in at the background of each moment, even happy and relaxed ones: the quivering of nerve endings, the claustrophobia, the looming dread at the glimpse of a panel of wall or a soldier with a gun, the uncertainty of exactly what may lie around the next bend of the road through the hills. It's all there, in the trumpets, the pizzicati, the flickering repetitive figures on keyboard, or the way a quiet chorus can build up so fast to unanticipated levels of violence.

What you experience in this opera is therefore something almost miraculously authentic. It is similar to the way Puccini captures the emotional truth of Rodolfo at the end of La Boheme when he realises Mimi is dead - those stark horns evoke in one precise stroke one's own memories of the moment a loved one died: that was it, that was how it felt, that is it exactly. This particular form of genius is reserved for only the most empathetic of operatic composers - something that no writer or visual artist can convey with such instant visceral impact.

And then... the clangs. It's the words. Not the structure - a deconstructive collage of impressions is a fine device for conveying the fractured memories of a past event and furthermore provide much-needed variety. Nor the details of the scenes, many of which are based, as we've seen, on reality. And I find it admirably "even-handed". But the details of the lines, the images, the metaphors, the words themselves, had me longing for a red pen to plaster over the surtitles. There are too many words: and they are cumbersome words, syllabic, complex, very wordy words, and often meaningless words - poetry that might (perhaps) work on the page, but that must have given Adams the mother of all headaches. When he described the other day the storminess of his working relationship with the poet Alice Goodman, I thought he was joking. Now I'm not so sure.

How do you work with a libretto like that? How do you even think it is suitable for setting? It takes three to five times as long to sing a word as to speak it, and there is no doubt that opera requires prima la musica - the words must serve musical needs. Perhaps they do, in their own way. But still, is it a good idea to throw the audience off balance, distracting you, jerking you out of the flow to wonder what exactly an antlion is when you are supposed to be caught up in the emotions of the hijacking's aftermath? I mean, we're not all David Attenborough. And it's equally startling to hear a reference to the Dome of the Rock in the Chorus of Exiled Jews, which depicts a couple implicitly thrown apart by the Second World War and reunited unexpectedly after many traumas. The man compares the woman's scars to the holy sites of Israel, but, not to put too fine a point on it, the Dome of the Rock itself is not a site holy to Judaism - it is its location, the Temple Mount, that is. This, and the antlion, are only two meagre examples. I don't remember this being such a problem in Penny Woolcock's film - but that had been heavily cut. (Here is Wikipedia to explain the antlion.)

The words, too, give the opera its slightly dated feel. Self-indulgent, pretentious poetic stuff in opera libretti was very much a feature of opera of the 1960s-80s (Klinghoffer's premiere was in 1991). Its ultimate death blow, I suspect, was Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003)Good, concise, beautiful poetry is another matter: Birtwistle's The Minotaur has a libretto by David Harsent that is a work of art. Time to take another look at how Da Ponte did it.

The other thing that clanged - or rather made a very small clunk - was the protest luridly predicted by the Sunday Telegraph, which materialised as one (1) man with a placard outside the theatre - he has no doubt achieved the not-inconsiderable solo feat of being mentioned in each and every write-up.

In time, Klinghoffer should come to be regarded as what it is: a fine, thought-provoking opera, representative of its era, flawed but with many beauties, the latter including passages that show Adams at his most inspired. It will be no more scandalous, a hundred years from now, than Le nozze di Figaro - the original play of which was thought, in its day, to be condoning class conflict.

Six more performances until 9 March. Do go and see it. 

Saturday, February 25, 2012

'Klinghoffer' opens tonight

...so John Adams came to London a day early and English National Opera held a Friends event at which artistic director John Berry interviewed him about his life and work. I went along to listen.

A thoroughly entertaining discussion: although he must have been extremely jet-lagged, the jokes flowed free and fast, if with serious points behind them. Audience member: "Was there any moment in your career when you felt able to say to yourself, 'Now I am a successful composer'?" Adams: "Possibly last Tuesday...but by Wednesday it was all gone."

The production, by Tom Morris - of War Horse fame (and more) - promises to be much more naturalistic than some of the other stagings over the years. Except, of course, for Penny Woolcock's screen version, which was shown on Channel 4 some years ago. It was filmed aboard a ship and the performers had to be shown how to hold and fire Kalashnikovs. "That was a bit too naturalistic for me," said John Adams. "Oh," said John Berry, "we're doing that as well."

Fascinating, also, to learn that originally Adams had planned the story of the hijacking and murder to occupy only the first half of the opera, with the second half a political black comedy featuring Margaret Thatcher and co. But when he began to compose the opening chorus, he realised that he had something altogether more serious in hand.

He was frank in describing his working relationship with Alice Goodman, the librettist, as stormy - "it made the Israeli-Palestinian situation look like a love-fest!" - and gave us a taste of the most difficult line of poetry he's ever had to set. It's in the captain's scene, when he reflects on the pleasures of being alone with the waves and time to think, though couched in somewhat different language. Listen out for it.

Interesting insights, too, into Adams's background and the attitude during his upbringing towards his hopes of becoming a composer. When he started out (he has just turned 65) it was, he thinks, almost impossible to contemplate a career writing music full-time; that situation has changed considerably over the decades. Nevertheless, he remarked, his parents never tried to push him towards a proper job like law or medicine; they wanted him to be an artist. He says that he always feels strange writing his occupation as "composer" on landing cards at airports, et al, and wonders if the immigration official will say "Composer?...just step over here a minute, sir..." - but for one occasion in the UK when the guy said to him, "Oh, I love Harmonium..."

One audience member asked him what he would have done had he not been a composer. Adams looked momentarily stumped - he eventually said that he enjoys writing, has a blog, has written a book and writes book reviews for the New York Times "because it's fun", so could have contemplated "something literary". But I think it's clear that his vocation as composer is so much part and parcel of who he is that he couldn't really imagine life without it at all.

Full production details and booking here.

I took along my CD of Klinghoffer for him to sign. And, dear reader, though I blush at such immodesty as to tell you what followed, the great composer then thanked me for the piece I wrote in the Independent the other week and said that it was the most eloquent article about Klinghoffer he had read in years. Dear reader, this does not happen every day. I guess that must be how Julius Korngold felt when Brahms got in touch (though hopefully any resemblance stops there). Here is the article again, in case you missed it.

And here is a trailer from ENO in which director Tom Morris talks about the work - followed, below, by extracts from, and reactions to, the dress rehearsal.






Thursday, February 09, 2012

"Klinghoffer" looms

Later this month ENO's new production of The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams's opera about a Palestinian hijacking at sea that took place in 1985, will bring this extremely controversial work to a full staging in the capital for the first time. It's taken 20 years for any opera house in London to dare to produce what's probably Adams's most important opera to date. Here are my thoughts on the matter from today's Independent, as well as chats with librettist Alice Goodman, conductor Baldur Bronnimann - who has worked in both Israel and the West Bank - and ENO's artistic director John Berry. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/fear-and-loathing-in-london-the-death-of-klinghoffer-is-staged-in-the-capital-for-the-first-time-6671388.html