South Florida Classical Review

John Adams conducted his music with the New World Symphony Saturday night. File photo: Riccardo Musacchio

The New World Symphony celebrated the 15^th anniversary of the New World Center on Saturday night. Designed by the late Frank Gehry, the auditorium, practice rooms, recording facilities and high-tech capabilities of the campus have proven a game changer for the orchestral academy. 

The building has fulfilled artistic director laureate Michael Tilson Thomas’s dream of a place for both the New World’s fellows and audiences to explore, grow and experience the arts in pathbreaking ways. In the adjacent Soundscape Park, wallcasts of selected concerts have allowed thousands of listeners to share in the artistry on display in the hall. 

Artistic director Stéphane Denève dedicated the evening’s  concert to the memory of Gehry who died last month at age 96.

It was appropriate that this celebratory program was devoted to the music of John Adams. One of America’s most prominent and outstanding composers, Adams has been an important presence at the New World across the past three decades. Tilson Thomas frequently programmed his works and Adams has appeared as guest conductor numerous times. Adams shared the podium with Denève for a program of works that spanned nearly 40 years of his creative output.

The concert’s centerpiece was After the Fall for piano and orchestra. Adams’ third piano concerto was conceived for Icelandic pianist Vikingur Ólafsson who gave the 2024 premiere with the San Francisco Symphony and was soloist in the New World performance Saturday with the composer conducting. 

Cast in one 25-minute movement, the work is, in many ways, a traditional concerto with three contrasting sections. After the Fall finds Adams in top creative form and is a major addition to the 21^st century concerto literature.

Two harps and glassy strings weave over the piano’s initial entrance. Soon Adam’s writing morphs into repetitive thematic motifs that resound like modern day Grieg or Ravel. In the slow central section, a simple theme takes on expansive complexity. The imaginative keyboard writing is filled with recurrent incident and transformation of the thematic material. 

Ólafsson is noted for his Bach performances and Adams utilizes the C  minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier as the basis for the finale—a kind of contemporary “Switched-On Bach”—which turns jazzy and virtuosic before a quiet ending from strings and harp. In this context, it was a tribute to a great pianist,, a champion of both works from the past and the modern era.

Pianist Vikingur Ólafsson performed John Adams’ After the Fall Saturday night. Photo: DG

After the Fall is a terrific score that plays to Ólafsson’s strengths – sterling technique, poetic elegance of touch and boundless energy and stamina. The Bach theme was etched with accuracy and delicacy before powerful volleys across the keyboard displayed Ólafsson’s bravura side. His subtle musicianship was evident throughout the concerto’s shifting moods. Adams led a pulsating traversal of the multihued orchestral lines. All sections of the orchestra responded in brilliant form with the horns especially outstanding in Adams’ high, difficult writing.

Ólafsson and Adams were greeted by bravos, cheers and a standing ovation at the score’s conclusion. As an encore, Ólafsson offered a transcription of the Andante (second movement) of Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4 which he dedicated to Gehry. His light and nimble articulation, with every note perfectly placed, showed him as a master Bach interpreter indeed. Ólafsson should return to New World, sooner rather than later, to explore his wide-ranging repertoire with the fellows. He is clearly a unique and gifted musician.

Adams opened the evening with The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra. This 1985 work is a sketch for the banquet scene in Adams’ opera Nixon in China. The composer led the vignette with precise rhythm and focus, never allowing the heavy brass and percussion to overwhelm the strings. Traces of sensuousness in the middle episode brought lustrous sonorities from the string players.

Denève took over podium duties for the concert’s second half. I Still Dance is a 2019 work that Adams dedicated to Tilson Thomas and his husband and manager Joshua Robison. Adams described it as “a toccata on steroids.” Funky Baroque would be an apt description of this fun piece which Denève conducted with vigorous aplomb. It was accompanied by a video of dancers which was visually diverting if unnecessary. Adams’ music brings out the best in the New World players and they responded with vigorous enthusiasm.

The program concluded with the Doctor Atomic Symphony, Adams’ 2007 distillation of mostly orchestral excerpts from his opera of the same name about physicist J. Robert Oppoenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. 

“The Laboratory,” the opening section, sounds like the beginning of a film score, replete with brassy proclamations and a wind machine. “Panic” reflects the sense of chaos a bombing entails and the scientists’ anxiety as they work to create the weapon. Playing rapid, cascading figurations, the strings produced stunning intensity. (Adams told the audience he has seen many orchestras struggle with those passages but not the New World fellows.) Denève brought forth the music’s frightening aura. “Trinity” portrays the site in New Mexico where the bomb was tested. Adams has made an instrumental setting of the opera’s baritone aria  “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” (based on a poem by John Donne) in which Oppenheimer ponders the Faustian bargain he has made and longs to regain his soul. Adams gives a solo trumpet the baritone’s vocal aria. A melody both eloquent and elegiac is interrupted by agitated strings and winds. This is top-drawer Adams and music of great beauty. Jack Farnham sustained the broad trumpet line, evidencing stellar control of the instrument. Denève drew out the pathos of this haunting section effectively.

The audience’s enthusiasm throughout the concert was a tribute to Adams and Denève’s collaboration but also to the vision of Gehry and the ailing Tilson Thomas. It was an appropriate commemoration that celebrated the past and looked to the future.

The New World Symphony repeats the program 2 p.m. Sunday at the New World Center in Miami Beach.   nws.edu

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