Jeroen van Veen THE BEST OF MINIMAL PIANO MUSIC

 

THE BEST OF MINIMAL PIANO MUSIC

 

Anne Sofie von Otter / Brooklyn Rider SO MANY THINGS

SO MANY THINGS

Timo Andres / Jeremy Denk / Brad Mehldau / Randy Newman I STILL PLAY

 I STILL PLAY

Berliner Philharmoniker THE JOHN ADAMS EDITION

                                                       THE JOHN ADAMS EDITION

Yuja Wang / Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic JOHN ADAMS Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

                                   MUST THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD TUNES?

Christina Naughton / Michelle Naughton AMERICAN POSTCARD

“They have to be heard to be believed,” said the Washington Post of piano duo Christina and Michelle Naughton. The twin sisters pay tribute to their homeland with the album American Postcard. It offers music by four US composers: John Adams (his Roll Over Beethoven, a work the Naughtons premiered in 2016), Aaron Copland, Conlan Nancarrow and Paul Schoenfield. As the sisters explain, “These pieces show the diversity and variety of American music. But one thing that ties them together is an exuberance that, to us, feels deeply American.”

Shani Diluka ROAD 66

Diluka brings appreciable nuance and delicacy to Adams’s China Gates and Beach’s Young Birches, and infuses the churning minimalist patterns of Glass’s Etude No 9 with more dynamic and colouristic range than one often hears from so-called contemporary music specialists. In most lyrical pieces, however, softer dynamics often recede and wilt to the point of fading away, especially when Diluka makes diminuendos. You hear this in the two Bernstein Anniversaries, Ginastera’s ‘Danza de la moza donosa’ and Grainger’s gorgeous transcription of Gershwin’s ‘Love walked in’. Her spineless performance of Copland’s Piano Blues No 1 lacks the sinew and projection heard from Leo Smit, the work’s dedicatee, although such a style befits Hyung-ki Joo’s noodly, shapeless Chandeliers. 

However, Diluka’s faster-than-usual tempo for Cage’s In a Landscape rescues this music from its usual frozen dream state. Her enervated, flaccid approach to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans is alien to these jazz icons in both spirit and letter; in fact she misreads Waltz for Debby’s fourth-to-last chord. But Diluka plays the piano part to Raphaël Merlin’s brilliant, harmonically imaginative arrangement of Cole Porter’s ‘What is this thing called love’ gorgeously, abetted by special guest Natalie Dessay’s sultry singing. Had the two paired up for an entire CD’s worth of Merlin-arranged standards, I would have stayed up all night behind the wheel to listen, rather than squirming in the back seat to the tune of ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ (Jed Distler / Gramophone)

Sung-Soo Cho MAXIMUM | MINIMUM | MODERN

Korean pianist Sung-Soo Cho performs an intriguing recital of compositions by American composers that range from works with very progressive musical language to ones that integrate influences of folk and honky-tonk -- in other words, the full spectrum of modern American classical music. The oldest work on the program was written in 1967 and the most recent in 2015. John Corigliano, Michael Ippolito, John Adams, Lowell Liebermann, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, and David Rakowski are all represented on this recording. These composers have a strong advocate in Sung-Soo Cho, who was awarded "Best American Contemporary Performance: at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition and "Best Performance of the Commissioned Work: at the Texas State International Piano Competition. An award winner of numerous international competitions, Cho has appeared as a soloist in Asia, the U.S., and Europe. A graduate of Seoul National University and Manhattan School of Music, he is currently pursuing his D.M.A. degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is on the faculty at Notre Dame College.

Doric String Quartet / Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Peter Oundjian JOHN ADAMS Naive and Sentimental Music - Absolute Jest

As part of his final year as Music Director and following a two-season celebration of the Orchestra’s 125th anniversary, Peter Oundjian and the RSNO here present their second recording of music by John Adams, with the exceptional participation of the Doric String Quartet.

Written for a large orchestra including six percussionists, keyboard sampler, and amplified steel-string guitar, Naive and Sentimental Music is a sweepingly symphonic masterpiece, full of contrasts and clashes. It reflects the dichotomy between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poetry as analysed by Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, as well as the ‘bipolar’ musical life of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dedicatee of this piece, who conducted the first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999.

Absolute Jest is a large-scale scherzo for amplified string quartet and orchestra, heavily inspired by the music of Beethoven, which Adams has always deeply admired. The quartet of soloists, a late addition to the score, emphasises the echoes of Beethoven’s music (mainly his string quartets) and   facilitates a ‘hyperspace rate’ of virtuosity, which the Doric String Quartet here perfectly demonstrates.

Leila Josefowicz / St. Louis Symphony / David Robertson JOHN ADAMS Violin Concerto

Nonesuch releases a new recording of John Adams's Grawemeyer Award–winning Violin Concerto (1993) with his frequent collaborators violinist Leila Josefowicz, conductor David Robertson, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on April 27, 2018. The album was recorded at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis in 2016.

Adams's Violin Concerto was co-commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the New York City Ballet. It was described by the Boston Globe as having "the qualities of intelligence, craftsmanship, and quirkiness that have always marked the composer and his work; this time Adams also mingles virtuoso show with soul, popular appeal with the staying power that comes from intellectual interest." The premiere recording of the work, featuring violinist Gidon Kremer and the London Symphony Orchestra led by Kent Nagano, was released by Nonesuch in 1996.

Josefowicz said of the concerto in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "It was the piece where [Adams] first got to know me as a person and a player, when I was twenty-one. I'm now thirty-eight. When I started playing this piece, it was the confirmation of the new path that I was on, to really go down this new road with new music and with composers, because this experience was so inspiring for me." She further said, "It has a really dancelike feeling, so the violin line is often incredibly syncopated with everything else going on in the orchestra … Basically, it's supposed to make you groove."

Michael Tilson Thomas / San Francisco Symphony ADAMS Harmonielehre - Short Ride in a Fast Machine

By 2012, the San Francisco Symphony had played about two dozen of John Adams' works, about half of them world premiere or U.S. premiere performances, including seven pieces it commissioned, so it has easy claim on the title of being THE orchestra for Adams performances. Adams wrote the massive Harmonielehre for the orchestra while he was its Composer in Residence, and Edo de Waart led the premiere in 1985. This live 2010 performance with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the orchestra marks the 25th anniversary of the piece. This performance is so extraordinarily fine that it would be pointless to quibble over whether or not it surpasses the terrific original recording with de Waart, but it certainly gives it a run for its money, and may for some listeners have an edge. In any case, it is incalculably superior to its only other real competition with Simon Rattle leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The extraordinarily clear, lively sound of SFS Media's sonically spectacular SACD allows details of orchestration to be heard with fresh brilliance and makes this a version no one who loves the piece will want to be without. Harmonielehre is an exhausting, exhilarating work in the way a late Romantic symphony can be, and Tilson Thomas masterfully conveys the complex score's emotional volatility with appropriately startling ferocity. The explosive, pounding chords of the opening of the first movement are viscerally shocking, and Tilson Thomas maintains a sense of the music's urgency though its extended roller coaster of mood shifts. The second movement, "The Anfortas Wound," is a ferocious howl of pain and frustration that Adams said characterizes his anguish over the extended period of writer's block that finally gave way to the composition of Harmonielehre. Tilson Thomas brings catharsis in the shimmering, luminous final movement, "Meister Eckhardt and Quackie." The orchestra's playing throughout is superb: absolutely secure technically, with a luscious, vibrant tone, and with the interpretive and idiomatic depth that comes from intimate familiarity with the music. The album includes a sparkling, propulsive reading of Short Ride in a Fast Machine from a live 2011 performance. Highly recommended. (Stephen Eddins)

Murcof / Vanessa Wagner STATEA

Statea is essentially about augmentation: Murcof's electronics enhancing Vanessa Wagner's piano. But the idea goes further. Statea is the result of an impromptu live performance that took place in 2010 at La Carrière De Normandoux, an old quarry in France that was turned into a contemporary arts centre. One artist's concert was taking place after the other's, so Wagner bridged the gap by playing pieces by Erik Satie. Murcof joined her, and their improvisation has since grown.
Statea revolves around minimalist piano compositions, including Aphex Twin's lyrical "Avril 14th." On the surface, that may seem like a wildcard inclusion, nestled next to Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, but it's part of a wider narrative: augmenting the minimal music tradition itself. Some selections even pre-date minimalism's 1960s New York origins, ascribed to forefathers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Only Glass appears here, his Kafka-inspired "Metamorphosis 2" concluding Statea with one of the record's purest recordings.  

Statea is less of a music history lesson than a dialogue between its collaborators. When they perform together, Murcof and Wagner take turns leading the charge, and it's the same here. Their version of John Cage's "In A Landscape" starts out with naturalistic playing from Wagner, before Murcof begins smearing the keys like watercolours. His electro-acoustic touches are subtle at first, but become intense enough that Wagner is all but phased out by the end. "In A Landscape" is morphed into something else entirely. "Musica Ricercata No. 2" is more of a melodramatic call and response between the two players. Wagner's playing is dynamic and emotive, but Murcof's rebuttals are more stinging. It goes to show the gulf between traditional musicians, limited to an instrument's physicality, and those with technology's endless possibilities.
For all of its alluring electronics, Statea would be nothing without the clarity of Wagner's piano. It's such contrasts—classical and ambient, the past and the present, the accentuated and the ambiguous—that make the record more than the sum of its parts, sounding richer and more nuanced with every listen. As a snapshot of a performance-based collaboration, Statea is strong, but the project's full scope can only be experienced in the concert halls that birthed it. (Holly Dicker)

Ilya Gringolts / Copenhagen Phil / Santtu-Matias Rouvali / Julien Salemkour KORNGOLD - ADAMS Violin Concertos

Two twentieth century violin concertos, stylistically polar opposites, but with a common emphasis on melody. Written by two very different composers who nevertheless, each in his own time, rejected the mid-20th century ascendancy of atonality and the serial composition of music.

John Adams (b.1947) is a composer who does not like to be pinned down. Being branded a minimalist has not suited him any better than did the confines of his training in the twelve-tone system while he was a student at Harvard. Adams has said that “it’s taken me 20 years to escape the corrosive effects of graduate school.” Indeed, his style has continued to evolve since his early association with the so-called minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The term itself is a bit of a misnomer – it is difficult to point to anything minimal in Glass’ Einstein on the Beach or Reich’s Desert Music. Musicologist Richard Taruskin prefers the term “Pattern and Process” music, which highlights the tendency of these composers to set patterns in motion within dense, rhythmically complex textures, and then gradually morph these patterns over time. But perhaps what the term refers to – aside from the hallmark components of repetition and a steady, often entirely unchanging pulse – is the dearth of melody that typifies the style. Adams himself recognized the incompatibility of this particular element of his music with the genre of the violin concerto:

“I knew that if I were to compose a violin concerto I would have to solve the issue of melody. I could not possibly have produced such a thing in the 1980s because my compositional language was principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy. Harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music of that decade; melody was almost non-existent.”

As if in reaction to having pushed melody aside for so long, the Violin Concerto, composed in 1993, is relentlessly, unforgivingly, melodic. Adams has called it “hypermelodic.” The entire piece is essentially one prolonged, continuously unfolding melody for the solo violin. Not that repetition as a device has disappeared from his music – the first movement sets the solo violin’s endless melody over persistent, steadily rising eighth-note figures in the orchestra. The second movement pays homage to a time-honoured repetitive form, one which moreover holds a cherished position in the violinist’s repertoire: the chaconne. Adams evokes a second duality here, beyond that of orchestra / solo instrument, with the association of a poem by American Robert Haas, “Body Through Which the Dream Flows.” The movement’s ethereal beauty is difficult to account for, but it is easy to imagine the solo violin’s fleeting, other-worldly imagery flowing through the sublime, yet corporeal sounds of the orchestra. The third movement is a satisfyingly virtuosic romp, with thrillingly “minimalist” writing for the orchestra, all the while maintaining unrelenting melodic invention in the solo violin part.

Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, premiered in 1947, might also be called “hypermelodic.” Korngold (1897-1957) himself noted that the concerto, “with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini.” Written at a time in music history where atonality held nearly undisputed sway in musically sophisticated circles (Korngold’s music is emphatically tonal, if harmonically complex), the work was the first in what Korngold hoped would be his triumphant return to concert music, after a long and celebrated career as Hollywood’s preeminent film composer. The piece contains material in each of its three movements from several of Korngold’s film scores, the rights to which he had shrewdly secured for himself in his contracts with the film studios.

Korngold in many ways single-handedly defined the genre of the film score, but in spite of his success he was plagued by the notion that he had sold his talents too cheaply – that a “true” composer wrote music for the concert hall and operatic stage. Korngold was well-established as an opera composer in Vienna when he came to Hollywood for the first time in 1934. He returned in 1938 to write the score for 1938’s ground-breaking Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. Hitler’s Anschluss in March of that year intervened, and Korngold elected to stay in California, vowing to support his family by writing music for films until Hitler was defeated. (Orchid Classics)

Bruce Brubaker INNER CITIES

Bruce Brubaker joined the New England Conservatory faculty as piano chair in 2005. In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his continuing series of recordings for Arabesque—Bruce Brubaker is a visionary virtuoso. Named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America, Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s "Today" show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post critic Tim Page has said: “I wouldn't trade Pollini, Argerich, Richard Goode, Peter Serkin or Bruce Brubaker (to mention a terrific younger artist) for any handful of Horowitzes!” Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall at Zankel Hall in New York, at Trifolion in Echternach, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s acclaimed new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge.

Bruce Brubaker’s CDs for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues (music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine. (New England Conservatory)

Tamsin Waley-Cohen / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Andrew Litton ROY HARRIS - JOHN ADAMS Violin Concertos

Tamsin Waley-Cohen has recorded a new disc of Roy Harris and John Adams Violin Concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton. The recording will be released on Signum Records on CD and download on 30 September. This continues her series of concerto recordings on Signum, with these two contrasting works by American composers. 

Already considered by many to be a modern classic, John Adams 1993 Violin Concerto was described by the composer as having a ‘hypermelody’, in which the soloist plays longs phrases without stop for the duration of the 35 minute piece. Although composed in 1949, the first performance of Roy Harris’s Violin Concerto didn’t occur until 1984. Since then it has been championed for its “luminous orchestration and exalted tone”.

“Roy Harris may be the most all-American composer you have never heard of...Waley-Cohen handles [the Adams's] gruelling solo part with athleticism and conviction, and both pieces benefit from the punchy playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and insightful conducting of Andrew Litton.” (The Guardian)

Leila Josefowicz / David Robertson / St. Louis Symphony JOHN ADAMS Scheherazade.2

Violence against women is no modern tragedy. Composer John Adams found that out when he saw an exhibition about the tales of the Arabian Nights — ancient stories in which Scheherazade tells her murderous husband a new tantalizing tale each night for 1001 nights, thus sparing her life a day at a time. The composer, writing in Scheherazade.2's booklet notes, says he was surprised by how many of the stories included women suffering brutality.

That got Adams thinking about "the many images of women oppressed or abused or violated that we see today in the news on a daily basis." Now, Adams has updated Scheherazade's disturbing story in a 50-minute piece for violin and orchestra.

Borrowing a formula from Hector Berlioz (with a nod to Scherherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov's popular symphonic suite), Adams created a "dramatic symphony," casting the violin as a modern-day Scheherazade — the smart woman who remains fearless in the face of cruelty. Over the course of four movements, no precise narrative is spelled out, yet Adams' descriptive titles and his cinematic music go a long way in unfolding a potent drama, masterfully illuminated by conductor David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

It begins with a strum of harp strings, the whoosh of winds and the clatter of a cimbalom (hammered dulcimer), as if a brightly colored curtain is swept back, inviting listeners inside. Here, we meet Scheherazade in the form of violinist Leila Josefowicz, a longtime Adams collaborator and courageous champion of new music, who gives a searing performance. She arrives with handsome, sinuous lines but later speaks in spikier gestures. In its lyrical moments, backed by Adams' lush orchestration, the music recalls Samuel Barber's beloved Violin Concerto.

The vibrant pulsations that open the second movement, "A Long Desire (Love Scene)," give way to a dreamy oasis of floating strings and flickering winds. Scheherazade enters sweet and high as the music grows more impassioned. Her winding, sensual song, one of the work's highlights, is backed by a delicate scrim of strings.

"Scheherazade And The Men With Beards," the disruptive third movement, finds our heroine trading arguments with a council of agitated strings, chattering winds and percussion. Her entreaties are mellifluous and articulate, but the opposition overpowers her with snarling brass and thunderous drums.

In "Escape, Flight, Sanctuary," Scheherazade makes her getaway amid an outburst of brass. Then she's off and running in frenzied bowing, with wind figures rushing to catch up. The fierceness and vulnerability Josefowicz expresses contributes to an award-caliber performance. Finally, palatial walls of Sibelius-like string textures enfold Scheherazade. She's found refuge, but who knows how safe she really is? (Tom Huizenga)

Christina Naughton / Michelle Naughton VISIONS Adams - Bach - Messiaen

The twin-sister duo of Christina and Michelle Naughton have made a deep splash since graduating from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and coming on the scene in 2008. They've recorded conventional duo-piano repertory and succeeded through sheer charisma, but they break through to a new level with this innovatively programmed album that takes its title from its opening work, Messiaen's ecstatic Visions de l'amen (Visions of Amen), composed in 1943. This is one of Messiaen's epic works of the World War II years, perhaps less often heard than the likes of Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus due to its unusual genre, and the Naughton sisters absolutely blow it away with a rare combination of technical brilliance and deep musical communion. Sample the finale, "Amen de la Consommation" (track 7), for an amazing bit of spiritual intensity from artists so young. The entr'acte, an arrangement of "Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeir" from Bach's Cantata No. 106, is a lovely, static nod to the sisters' traditional training, and then it's on to John Adams' rollicking and thoroughly enjoyable Hallelujah Junction, which somehow fits perfectly with the sisters' pop-star images. Beautifully recorded at a studio at Boston's WGBH radio, this is one of the most satisfying duo piano recordings in recent memory. (James Manheim)

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus JOHN ADAMS Harmonium

Music emerges from a dark tunnel, a smooth and liquid train with a large chorus as passengers. The accelerated evolution of Harmonium is brought forth in what Adams calls a “preverbal creation scene,” an inescapable feeling of solitary light tinted with the weight of retrospection as the voices intercede. Harmonium seems to revel in self-awareness, building as it does through a series of dynamic swings from the threshold of audibility to ringing pronouncements of verse. It is a convoluted world where density and transparency coexist in equal measure.

At times this piece sounds like Adams’s popular Shaker Loops with words, at others like a Philip Glass tribute with characteristic pulses of flute and strings, at still others like a ritual of its own kind. It is a pastiche of poetry (John Donne and Emily Dickinson provide the texts), a bridge of intentions, a house with only two windows.

The recording quality here may polarize listeners somewhat. While on the one hand it captures the overall mood of the piece in a rather heterogeneous mix, on the other it loses detail in the quieter moments. I would imagine, however, that engineering choices in this case were dictated by Adams’s vision for the piece as a whole. It is meant to be a single “fabric of sound,” thereby necessitating a more distanced recording. It is like a lake: deceptively uniform from a distance, but promising new life and environments if only we can plunge into its depths. Yet somehow we are unable to take that plunge. The recording engineer, like the listener, is an observer here rather than an intruder. We do not approach this music; it approaches us, and it can only come so far before receding into its womb. (ecmreviews.com)

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic JOHN ADAMS The Gospel According to the Other Mary

In December 2000, the premiere of El Niño signaled a landmark in John Adams’ artistic evolution. This Nativity oratorio, premiered over the weeks of Christmas at Paris’ Châtelet Theater, conveyed a message of rebirth and hope attuned to what the composer sensed as the mood of the new millennium.

Yet the very simplicity of this story of birth and renewal allowed Adams to evoke unsuspected undercurrents of darknessbeneath its reassuring light. Already in that score, juxtaposed against musical imagesof joy and the miraculous, one could hear a threatening note of violence, especiallyin the work’s climactic episode of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.This strategy of weaving together multiple, at times contradictory, layers of emotionalresonance is even more central to Adams’ new work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. It is a key to his treatmentof that most archetypal story of Western music and art: the Passion of Jesus. For several years Adams and hislongtime collaborator Peter Sellars contemplated a companion piece to El Niño.
Their goal, explains Sellars, was to set the Passion story “in the tradition of sacredart, in the eternal present.” Violence and suffering and transformation are theimportant components of this story, and by drawing on his entire repertoire of experienceas a dramatic composer Adams depicts these with searing humanity.
But his unflinching portrayal of the human condition is only part of The Other Mary’s vast spectrum. Operating on twosimultaneous planes – the biblical and the contemporary – his score goes to the heartof its often disturbing subject matter with a keen psychological intuition, particularly in the portrait of the work’s title character.“Of all the arts music is by far the mostpsychologically precise,” Adams has saidabout his work as a composer.
“The subtlestharmonic shading or melodic twistcan completely color and influence howthe listener feels about and perceives aperson or event. Music being above andbeyond all things the art of feeling, it is thecomposer’s role to give emotional and psychologicaldepth to a character or a scene.No other art form provides such potenttools.”This is a Passion not only of Jesus, butof a family who loved and were loved byhim: Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha,and their brother Lazarus. Its creatorsreject the conventional “reformed prostitute”version of Mary Magdalene, consideringit a baseless identity foisted onher centuries after the fact. They presentinstead a woman of rich emotional complexity,a psychically damaged womanwhose turbulent inner life and hard pastgo hand in hand with her deep powers of intuition and volatile sensuality.

Gustavo Dudamel / Los Angeles Philharmonic THE INAUGURAL CONCERT (mp4 / AAC 320 kbps)

LOS ANGELES — That Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a free concert last Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl, a multicultural community love fest, will always be a point of pride for citizens here.

Mr. Dudamel’s much-anticipated official inaugural came on Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a formidable program with Mahler’s First Symphony and the premiere of a new work by John Adams. This was a black-tie gala, complete with a red- carpet procession of celebrities and patrons, and a South American-themed post-concert dinner in a makeshift tent set up outside the hall, smack in the middle of South Grand Avenue.

For all of Mr. Dudamel’s innate abilities to connect with audiences and inspire young people, he was hired to conduct a major American orchestra. The 10-minute ovation that erupted at the end of the Mahler made clear that supporters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic are thrilled with their new 28-year-old music director. But this was an exceptional and exciting concert by any standard.

Making a telling artistic statement, Mr. Dudamel began his tenure conducting the premiere of the new Adams piece, “City Noir,” a bustling, complex 35-minute work in three movements: the final panel in a triptych of orchestral works inspired by what Mr. Adams calls the “California experience,” its “landscape and its culture.” (The first two are “El Dorado” and “The Dharma at Big Sur,” a violin concerto.) 

The piece was suggested, Mr. Adams has written, by the richly evocative books on California’s social history by Kevin Starr, especially a chapter called “Black Dahlia,” which explores the sassy, shoddy and sensational era of the 1940s and ’50s, which gave rise to film noir. It is not easy to evoke the milieu of an era in music. But this score was also inspired by jazz-inflected American symphonic music of the 1920s through the ’50s, from Gershwin to Copland to Bernstein, something that is a lot easier to evoke.

Mr. Adams does so brilliantly in this searching, experimental de facto symphony. The first movement, “The City and Its Double,” begins with a wash of orchestral sound, murmuring motifs and rhythmic shards. Scurrying figurations break out and whirl around, getting stuck in place one moment, spiraling off frenetically the next. Is this harmonically astringent be-bop or weird echoes of a Baroque toccata?

Eventually the violins begin a winding, sometimes aimless-sounding episode of fitful, churning lines. Mr. Adams has become a master at piling up materials in thick yet lucid layers. Moment to moment the music is riveting. Yet, as in some other Adams scores, I found it hard to discern the structural spans and architecture of this one.

The pensive second movement, “The Song Is for You,” with its hazy sonorities, slithering chords, sultry jazzy solos and undulant riffs, does somehow convey California. The third movement, “Boulevard Night,” begins languorously but soon erupts, all jagged, quirky and relentless. Call it “The Rite of Swing.”

Mr. Dudamel, gyrating on the podium and in control at every moment, drew a cranked-up yet subtly colored performance of this challenging score from his eager players. He seemed so confident dispatching this metrically fractured work that I was drawn into the music, confident that a pro was on the podium.

Like Mr. Dudamel’s Beethoven Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl, the Mahler performance was not what you might expect from a young conductor. For all the sheer energy of the music-making, here was a probing, rigorous and richly characterized interpretation, which Mr. Dudamel conducted from memory. The suspenseful opening of the first movement, with its sustained tones and cosmic aura, had uncannily calm intensity. But when bird calls and genial folk tunes signaled the awakening of nature, the music had disarming breadth and guileless tenderness. And Mr. Dudamel was all ready-set-go when Mahler’s wildness broke out.

In the rustic second movement, he captured the music’s beery, galumphing charm, and milked the Viennese lyricism with the panache of a young Bernstein. He and his players uncovered the slightly obsessive quality of the songful slow movement, with its droning repetition of tonic-dominant bass patterns. And he viscerally conveyed the fits and starts of the mercurial finale, building to a brassy climactic fanfare almost scary in its ecstasy.

The musicians were with him all the way, though the playing was rough at times, with patchy string tone and scrappy execution. For all the important accomplishments, of Mr. Dudamel’s predecessor, Esa-PekkaSalonen, he was not the most gifted orchestra builder. The vitality of the playing was always inspiring. No one wants the slick virtuosity that some orchestras are content with. Still, Mr. Dudamel and his players may have work to do.

At the end, as a confetti shower of Mylar strips fell from the ceiling, Mr. Dudamel returned to the stage again and again. But he never took a solo bow from the podium. Instead, he stood proudly with his players on stage. (By Anthony Tommasini / Published: October 9, 2009/ New York Times)