John Adams: Complete Piano Music
John Adams: Phrygian Gates, American Berserk, China Gates, Hallelujah Junction
Ralph van Raat, Piano (with Maarten van Veen, Piano)
Naxos 8.559285
American composer John Adams (b. 1947) is one of a generation of composers somewhat clumsily labeled postmodernists and/or post-minimalists; but he’s an artist whose work defies easy stylistic categorization. One can particularly appreciate the evolution of his musical language in this survey of Adams’s complete piano music to date on Naxos.
Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat recognizes the extraordinary rhythmic precision and colorful voicing required by this music. In 1977′s China Gates and 1978′s Phrygian Gates, more overtly minimal works that helped to put Adams on the map, van Raat creates shimmering treble ostinati, complemented by booming bass octave passages and fragmented, Stravinskyian modal treble melodies. The “gating” procedure used by Adams, similar to the “phasing” constructs of Reich, creates fascinating rhythmic transitions which outline the broad formal sections of the works.
Adams waited nearly twenty years before writing his next piano composition, a piece for two pianos entitled Hallelujah Junction (1996). Maarten van Veen joins van Raat for this two-piano work. Vivacious and brilliantly hued, with an orchestral-sized palette of timbral affects, Hallelujah Junction demonstrates Adams employing the signatures of minimalism as a basic template, but peppering the texture with more abrupt transitions and ruptured syncopations than his gating pieces demonstrated.
One sees a logical end to this development in the highly boogie-woogie influenced American Berserk (2001), a piece in which, as van Raat points out in his liner note essay, Adams evokes the spirit of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. Whereas Nancarrow employed player pianos in order to be able to compose complex canons that, at the time, were problematic for live performers, in American Berserk Adams requires human players to emulate the Herculean feats of mechanized musical instruments: complex metric modulations, polyrhythmic canons, and breakneck tempi. Perhaps one of the benefits of the “postmodern, post-minimal” era is that gifted performers such as van Raat are available to actualize such imaginative, daring, and compelling music.
-Christian Carey
Entries (RSS)