The Prom concert on Tuesday night was given by the BBC Symphony and John Adams, with pianist Olli Mustonen. The big event of the evening was the first performance of Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, a big instrumental piece based on scenes from his opera of the same name. In this project he was consciously following the example of Hindemith with Mathis der Mahler in not merely assembling a sort of suite from the opera, but recomposing the material into a related but nonetheless independent symphonic composition. In a pre-concert talk Adams said that the task had been much more difficult and time consuming than he had at first envisioned: what he had assumed he could do in a month actually took seven. His main problem was with the reworking of the original music, containing vocal lines, as a completely instrumental texture including those lines as instrumental parts in a completely convincing way.

The symphony is in four movements, The first, The Laboratory, from the beginning of the opera is set in Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, and includes what in the opera was a choral setting of text from a book about the military uses of atomic weapons; the second, The Bedroom, is based primarily on music setting a poem by Baudelaire which is a set piece in a scene in the opera for Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty; Panic, the third movement, the most extended, uses music from the second act having to do anxiety about whether or not the bomb will actually work (and other kinds of panic, Adams said); the concluding movement, Trinity, is an intensely sorrowful song based on the opera’s climactic music, sung by Oppenheim, setting the Donne sonnet, Batter My Heart Three Personed God. The symphony is a wonderful piece, serious in its intent and imposing in its execution, and always compelling and engaging. It is gorgeously orchestrated, full of beautiful lines, beautifully written for the instruments and completely sure in its dramatic trajectory and timing. (Adams should write a tuba concerto immediately; the writing for tuba was especially imaginative and effective.) It was exciting to hear it, and it makes me want to hear the whole opera as soon as possible. If there’s any quibble about it, it might be that so many of the tunes are in the horn, the trombone, and the bassoons. Adams spoke about this in his talk. Most of the music he used in the symphony involves men’s singing parts, and he put them in instruments which have the same range. The exception to this is the last movement, based on the Donne setting, which he moved up in register and turned into a wonderful trumpet megasolo. One might wish that he had spread the other voice parts over the entire register and timbre of the orchestra as well.

Adams the opera composer has a pretty near perfect sense of how long things should go on and when something different should happen. Century Rolls, a big piano concerto, suggests that Adams the instrumental composer doesn’t. It seemed to me that each of the three movements went on too long, the first movement most egregiously, being, to my mind, about twice too long.
(I presume there was some kind of process going on which caused this to happen.) The instrumental writing, although engaging and interesting, also lacked anything like the specificity of the beautifully shaped former vocal lines in the Doctor Atomic Symphony, and although the piano part seemed plenty hard, it also most of the time was just part of the general texture, rather than standing out in any way. The exception to this was the second movement, which was very beautiful. It’s title is Manny’s Gym, Manny being Emmanuel Ax, for whom it was written, and the Gym in this case being a Gymnopedie; the quality of the piece as a Gymnopedie is not immediately apparent, but is gradually revealed, presumably also systematically somehow. The third movement, Hail Bop, was intended, apparently, as a sort of tribute both to bebop lines and to Nancarrow, but didn’t actually seem much different in character or method from the first movement. The performances of both the Adams pieces seemed to be near perfect.

The concert began with an excellent performance of the suite from Billy the Kid by Copland. For my money, this is the best of the Copland ballets; it’s always interesting and inventive and always, however pompous it may be to put it like this, music of substance, which, it seems to me, can’t be said for the other two. In his pre-concert talk, Adams said that he thought that the ‘populist’ Copland pieces were better than his other pieces. With all due respects to Mr. Adams, this seems to me to be quite foolish. Not that I want to make the opposite case, but rather I’d like to do away with the distinction. The manner of Billy the Kid, the way it’s put together and the way it works, is really not different from the manner of the Sextet/Short Symphony, for instance, and, for that matter, even with the cowboy tunes, it doesn’t sound all that different; nor does Music for the Theater, say, sound all that different, really, from even the Lincoln Portrait. Arthur Berger, when he wrote a review of the Piano Sonata in the 1940’s (hailing it as evidence of Copland’s return to his ‘asbsract’ style) got a rebuke from Copland for making the distinction between his ‘popular’ and ‘abstract’ (I think those were Berger’s terms) works; to Copland it all just seemed to be just his music. (Nowadays, I think people would probably list the Piano Sonata among the populist pieces, anyway, which says something about the validity of the distinction.) Generally, when somebody tries to make a lot of the difference, as Mr. Adams did, they’re not really trying to say anything much about the music so much as they’re just trying to take an opportunity to bash modernism, as Mr. Adams went on to do, and I’m not sure how much anybody gains from that.

The concert (and possibly the pre-concert talk) can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.

The Prom concert on Saturday night, August 11, featured the music of Nitin Sawhney exclusively. I have to confess that I did not know who Sawhney was, which is an big oversight obviously, since his website says that he is “widely regarded as one of the most influential and versatile creative talents alive today.” Had I been more observant, however, I would have realized that I had heard some of his work previously, though, since he is the composer of the music for the recent movie, The Namesake. Although he apparently does not like for his music to be described as fusion, in fact the two or three people I asked about him all used exactly that term in telling me about it.

Although his description of the Proms in his program notes (“…a slightly antiquarian and jingoistic institution…exuberant flag-waving [which] seemed unnervingly imperious and superfluous to the enjoyment of some breathtaking music…”) strictly speaking only applies to the Last Night (all the rest of the time one sees not a single flag of any kind, let alone seeing it waved), the fact of the program on the Proms once again raises (however tacitly) the question of how ‘universal’ (for lack of a better word) western classical music is: whether it speaks, or can speak, to the conditions of all people of all conditions, or is only the artifact of a specific society and can only be meaningful to those who are members of that one group (i.e. “dead white men”), and whether people of non-European origin are not only simply, as it were, locked out of an undertaking like the Proms, but are, in fact, discriminated against by not being by not having their own particular music included. In any case, the fact that one entire evening of the Proms was devoted to the music of a (native-born) British composer of south Asian origin was a significant event, and it was certainly seen as such by the many more than usual people of south Asian origin who were there. There were, in fact, plenty of people there–the place was completely packed–, reflecting, apparently (judging by sight), all kinds of other ethnic origins as well. Sawhney himself is certainly trained in western classical music and values it (“I liked playing Bach for control, Debussy for the emotion, Mozart for melodic ideas, and Chopin for the pyrotechnics,” he is quoted as saying in the program notes.), but he also casts a wide net of other interests and influences, including flamenco guitar, Punjabi folk music, tabla rhythms, and jazz. Each of these various interests was amply represented at some point in the thirty pieces on the program, performed by Mr. Sawhney, along with seventeen of his closest friends and the sixty-strong London Undersound Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Hussey.

The program included selections from his seven studio albums, along with music from a number of theatrical productions and movie soundtracks, and two works in progress. For this listener the most appealing music was found in the second half of the program, which included music from The Namesake, flowing seamlessly into The Boatman, both ‘inspired’ in ways not specified by Tagore, Nadia (meaning ‘the river’), all of those featuring the singing of Reena Bhardwaj, and Charukeshi Rain, a collaboration with Anoushka Shankar. The Conference, in which a considerable number of the performers participated vocally, is a fiercely difficult bit of “tabla pyrotechnics,” and was perhaps the most impressive number of the evening. Perhaps the least personal music was contained in the two battle scenes from ‘the forthcoming and highly anticipated’ video game Heavenly Sword. A long stretch of the second part of the first half, comprising Noches en vela, Part I, Sandesa, Journey, Breathing Light, A Throw of the Dice, and Koyal seemed to have been produced in reference to the same polling which produced Dave Soldier’s Most Wanted Song, since they shared a certain mid-tempo blandness and easy listening scoring with it and with each other. Excerpts from Zero Degrees, a theatrical work written by Sawhney with choreographers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and sculptor Antony Gormley about a trip from Bangladesh to Calcutta, in which a man harassed by border guards finds himself sharing a carriage with a corpse, were threaded through the whole evening; they were performed in a lazer speed unison speech by Khan and Cherkaoui with passion and humor, and they were mesmerizing.

Throughout the concert it was very hard to make out words. The acoustics in the Albert Hall can be difficult, but the high degree of amplification not only didn’t help things, it seemed to be a positive hindrance. In Dead Man, at the end of the first half, which traces two parallel lives in India and America, and in which it is apparently important that there is ‘a sardonic English refrain and fateful Bengali verse’, it was simply impossible to tell that the performers were singing in any language at all. There is also some irony in the fact that each of the members of the London Undersound Symphony Orchestra, ‘painstakingly selected’ by Sawhney himself, was closely miked and mixed into a homogenous whole where it was impossible to hear how good any of them might be or what any of them might be doing, the goal seeming to be to produce a sound exactly like a highly produced recording with no perceptible qualities of a live performance at all.

Whatever reservations I might have had, though, it was manifestly clear that all of the performers involved were wonderful musicians playing with great intelligence and absolute dedication, and their performances were being received with great enthusiasm by a packed out Albert Hall, none of whose members had any reservations at all.

This concert, along with all the others, is available for listening online for one week after the actual performance at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.

On July 3, the very excellent percussionist, Sam Solomon, presented a Boston University Tangelwood Institute (BUTI) faculty recital at Trinity Church in Lenox (Ma). His program included pieces by Nico Muhly, Eric Hewitt, Michael Early, David T. Little, Marcos Balter, and Judd Greenstein, two of them–Hewitt and Early–first performances. Due to the circumstances, the place was packed with attentive and enthusiatic teenagers, although that doesn’t mean that such a demographic wouldn’t necessarily show up to such a performance somewhere else, given how exciting and entertaining this one was.

Every one of the pieces was thoughtfully made and impressively and interestingly executed, and every one was snappy and enjoyable to listen to, and, I suppose, to watch, although my own sight lines weren’t all that good. Anyone of them, by itself, would have impressed me a fair amount. I found myself thinking, though, that, just as just about every piece for harp, flute, and one or two strings seems to suggest that Debussy figured out almost everything that could be done with the combination and did it a while ago, and therefore just about every piece ends up sounding a little like the Debussy sonata, every piece for percussion has a similar kind of strategy and intention. Each had its point, including the peppy beginning of the Muhly, the slightly random, water dripping in the sink, first section of the Early, and the general spashiness of the Balter. David T. Little’s Three Sams concentrated first on pitches in (—)I Am (a very engaging line with unexpected and enjoyable twists and turns, then on non pitched elements, especially cymbals and drums in the dark and angry Son of (—), and then combined them in the slow and mournful Wicked Uncle (—), with the pitched elements suggesting the ghosts of half remembered half recognizable hymns and patriotic songs. Judd Greenstein’s biblically titled We Shall Be Turned, was perhaps the most memorable for being the quietest and most meditative of the pieces, starting with a simple pattern and returning to it again as the starting point for each of its increasingly longer and most complex discourses.

Sam Solomon’s performance was elegant, eloquent, and full of pazazz. He played each of the pieces as though it was the most important thing in the world. It was wonderful to hear. The recital, at just about a hour without an intermission, was exactly the right length.