More Ringtone Fun

Alex Ross has announced that his current ringtone is John Adams’ Harmonielehre. Excellent choice.

As of a few days ago, mine is an old favorite: Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble. Before that, and I’ll probably go back soon, it was the announcement jingle heard constantly on Budapest trams and buses.

Check it out:

Now that I think about it… maybe Six Marimbas.

Doctor Atomic Symphony at the Proms

Last night the BBC Symphony premiered John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony, and my spies tell me you can still listen to the stream for another week. Go here and look for Prom 50. More info on the concert is available here. (You’ll also hear Copland’s Billy the Kid – Suite and Adams’ Century Rolls.)

Now, it’s no secret that I didn’t care for the opera as an opera, but I did think the music would be worthy of a concert version. So, let’s find out!

John Adams: A Flowering Tree

Last year I was very hard on John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. I wanted to like it, but, while I admired the music, I was disappointed in it as drama. Having now seen the San Francisco Symphony’s semi-staged production of Adams’ new opera A Flowering Tree, I’m very happy to say that it doesn’t share most of the problems I found in Doctor Atomic. I was an Adams early adopter, and an obsessed fan in the 80′s, so I was relieved.

This is a beautiful and admirable work, and it’s the first of John Adams’ theatrical works that actually “works”. I think the reason must be that this is the first one that has, you know, a plot. The music is rich and colorful, and chock full of delicious Adamsy goodness. The music is so effective, and yes, dramatic, that I wasn’t nearly as irritated by Peter Sellars’ staging as I would have been otherwise. Much has been made, with good reason, of Adams’ musical depiction of the main character’s transformation into a tree, which occurs four times in the opera. In each case, the context is different, and Adams paints each transformation in a different way, the final one being a literally spectacular payoff at the very end of the piece.

Painting. This is what Adams is extraordinarily good at in his operas. The final tree transformation joins the hair-raising arrival of Air Force One in Nixon in China, The “gymnopedie” depicting Klinghoffer’s slow-motion descent in The Death of Klinghoffer and the final moment of Doctor Atomic as great examples of how Adams’ can create music that, when combined with staging and lighting, tells a story that words cannot.

Again, this was a “semi-staged” production. About a third of the stage in Davies Symphony Hall was dedicated to staging, with a platform cleverly placed above the orchestra for some of the action. The staging used an interesting, and sometimes very moving, convention of having a dancer shadow each of the characters. Unfortunately, there are several long orchestral and choral passages that were, I guess, unstageable. During these passages we’d have the singers standing or sitting motionless and the dancers doing very little. It’s still unclear to me what the significance of some of these passages is in terms of the storytelling.

A Flowering Tree also makes use of a narrator, which can be problematic when it comes to staging. What do the characters do while the narrator is singing? Like Doctor Atomic, whose libretto was slapped together from “found materials”, this suggests some sort of fear of having to actually write for the characters, which I find puzzling and disappointing. But in this case, Sellars handled this fairly well, I thought. I guess there was so little happening anyway, so the narrator fit in somewhat naturally.

The use of a narrator and the many how-on-Earth-do-I-stage-this moments had me thinking that this might be a better oratorio than opera, but in the second act as the story unfolded I became increasingly convinced. Whereas Doctor Atomic had no plot to speak of, and we never heard from the characters in their own words, this piece has an appropriately simple plot. We understand what the characters want, and we’re routing for them. Given this foundation for the first time, Adams shows what he can do dramatically.

Philo’s Playlist

For a long time Philo was obsessed with Yiddish folk and theater music. I could not convince him to listen to anything else. (My own fault, I admit.)

Today it was Ravel’s Bolero. Yup, my almost-three-year-old sat through it twice in one sitting. Don’t get me wrong; I adore the piece, but I believe there are many adults who would rather drink their own bath water than sit through it once. (Their problem.)

But twice! Twice, and he was riveted, although disappointed with the sparing use of the bass drum.

I sure do like bass drum, dad!

(Did I mention he’s not three yet?)

Garbage Man Crying. 10/05

Philo’s interest in orchestral music has skyrocketed since we took him to see a puppet theater version of The Nutcracker back in D.C. Thanksgiving weekend. True, he needed to be removed from the theater in tears, along with several other two-year-olds (you know… Mouse King), but the experience made a deep impression on him. He frequently dances around to no music, and insists that he’s a scary puppet, and that one of us has to be the Nutcracker.

I don’t own a recording of The Nutcracker, but a few weeks ago I had an idea. “Hey Philo”, I announced, “Wanna hear some puppet music?” His eyes lit up. I put on Petrouchka , and he danced around, and acted out every character change in the music (and of course there are dozens). On this particular recording, The Rite of Spring follows, and he enjoyed that with a mixture of fear and fascination. (He did finally start freaking out a little near the very end, and I had to turn it off.)

I’ve since discovered that just about anything lively and orchestral works for Philo as puppet music, even if there’s no bass drum. (I was asked to turn off the Ravel Piano Trio — sigh.) Holst’s The Planets was a big hit, and if you have any doubt that I’m a sick, sick individual, I’ll mention that we also listened to Var�se’s Arcana, which follows on that particular recording. He actually didn’t mind it, which I think is great.

Here’s a partial Philo’s Thumbs-up list, based on lots of random trial-and-error:

• Bernard Herrmann, North By Northwest Overture
• Prokofiev, Classical Symphony
• John Adams, “Wild Nights!” section of Harmonium (and the preceding wind-up)
• Stravinsky, Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (despite the lack of bass drum)

So, I Saw Doctor Atomic…

So much has been written about Doctor Atomic now that I hope I can avoid being redundant. I am not a critic, or even much of a writer for that matter, so this may not be the most well organized set of thoughts, and I hope I can get my point across without seeming shrill or pontifical. Lisa Hirsch has a running list of reviews and blogs that cover the premiere, many of which are much more thorough than I intend to be, and so if you haven’t read anything about the piece yet, it might be a good idea to start there.

The long and the short of it is that Doctor Atomic is a thoroughly engaging and memorable evening, and I’m really glad I went, despite its major flaw. In fact, whereas normally I might have the urge to look at my watch at some point during a three-hour opera, in this case I didn’t do so until I was outside and couldn’t believe that it was after 11:00. I mention this in order to soften my overall tone, because as much as I did enjoy the piece, I was disappointed that this work did not live up to its potential.

John Adams and Me

It is gradually dawning on me how lucky I am to be able to see Doctor Atomic next week. I’m usually a bit of a homebody, and almost didn’t bother planning to go, but fortunately I snapped out of it, and I’m now suitably psyched. This seems like a good time to revisit some of the Adams pieces that were such an obsession for me in the past. Since I’m assuming I’ll write something about it after I see it, I thought I’d say something now about what my frame of reference is. (Otherwise, we would have a ridiculously long post.) [See Doctor Atomic posted 10/14]

Right now, I’m listening to Nixon in China, which I spent many, many hours with a long time ago, over a period of several years. It has now been years since I’ve taken this CD off the shelf. (The big “landing-of-Airforce-One” passage was enhanced somewhat by the fact that the Blue Angels were flying over my house, causing a terrifying roar that only a real writer could describe.) Upon casual listening, I have some new reservations about the piece as theater (which I’ll get into in a later post after seeing Doctor Atomic), but I have to say I’m enjoying the sweeping melodic lines and lush harmonies as much as ever.

I discovered John Adams when I was around twenty, a very formative time, and no composer’s music played a bigger role in shaping my aesthetic than his. In the late 80′s I sang in the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, a symphonic chorus frequently used by the Philadelphia Orchestra in those days. In 1988 we undertook John Adams’ choral masterpiece Harmonium (not with the Philly Orchestra, but on our own program), and I was never the same after that.

Doctor Atomic Reblog

Well, this San Francisco music blogger doesn’t get to see the John Adams opera Doctor Atomic until a week from tomorrow. I am a big John Adams fan going back to the 80′s, and pretty opinionated about musical theater, so I’m sure I’ll have a thing or two to say about it after that.

I’m taking the kind advice from M.C. of The Standing Room fame to avoid reading too much about it before I see it, but I did read Anthony Tommasini’s review in today’s New York Times, which was tantalizing. So far, it sounds like it’s a landmark work.

If you’re nowhere near San Francisco, or do not have the will power to avoid reviews, Lisa Hirsch offers a handy list of reviews from journalists around the country.

In the Wings also has some lovely comments, give a good idea of what the piece “smells” like, without giving too much away.

There are probably dozens or hundres more out there. Here’s a handy shortcut.

(This is my first attempt at “Trackback”. Am I doing it right?)