JACK Quartet JOHN LUTHER ADAMS Lines Made by Walking

 

LINES MADE BY WALKING

 

Seattle Symphony / Ludovic Morlot JOHN LUTHER ADAMS The Become Trilogy

THE BECOME TRILOGY

 

Seattle Symphony Orchestra / Ludovic Morlot JOHN LUTHER ADAMS Become Desert

Become Desert is the much-anticipated sequel to Adams’ Pulitzer-winning Become Ocean, and a major milestone in the creative partnership between the composer and the Seattle Symphony with Ludovic Morlot.

For Adams, who has been called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, the 40-minute work completes a trilogy he hadn’t intended to write, and yet it emerges as one of his most expansive and consciousness-raising musical statements to date.

In 2010, Adams created musical streams both aurally and visually with Become River. He followed with Become Ocean, which divides the orchestra into three parts to create a vast sense of undulating space and rhythm. The 2014 recording by Morlot and the Seattle Symphony debuted atop the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart, and won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

With Become Desert, space is once again a fundamental compositional element, but on a larger scale, with five different ensembles moving at five different tempos. The work features a large orchestra and choir that are deployed as five ensembles that surround the audience.

Seattle Symphony Orchestra / Ludovic Morlot JOHN LUTHER ADAMS Become Ocean

Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Become Ocean is set to finally extricate John Luther Adams from the shadow of his near-namesake. In fact the two lie at polar ends of the post-minimal spectrum. JLA composes slowly evolving, monumental sound creations that seem somehow to emerge from the essence of the earth. His lifelong engagement with elemental forces and the power of nature stems from years living in the Alaskan wilderness, where he has evolved a ‘music of place’ grounded in its physical, cultural and spiritual attributes.

Surprising, therefore, that Adams’s recent composition is inspired by the sea rather than the earth. Become Ocean takes the sense of scale and space that captured the composer’s imagination when he first visited Alaska in the 1970s and applies it to the deep, dark and hidden depths of the oceans surrounding the Pacific Northwest.

This is not ersatz programmatic music, however. Adams’s ‘sonic geography’ is a by-product of what can only be described as a keenly felt musical osmosis. If ever an orchestra sounded like an immense sonic object, slowly floating across a vast area, then this must be it. Become Ocean is divided into six seven-minute segments, with each one forming a kind of slow-motion wave. Some of these waves swell up into enormous, thunderous crashes, as heard around the 21' and 35' marks, causing changes in the music’s environment – like shifting glaciers in a frozen sea. As if to demonstrate the connection, there’s also a DVD consisting of six oceanic images looped in sequence to the music.

Of course, a strong cautionary message lies behind Become Ocean. To quote the composer himself: ‘As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.’ (Gramophone)

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 Daydreams

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 is the second compilation album to emerge from the summer music season at Montana’s Tippet Rise Arts Center, which features performance spaces of acoustic perfection amidst a sculpture-laden terrain of awe-inspiring beauty, nestled against a backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains near Yellowstone National Park. From the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 inhabits the sphere of Daydreams, a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty where natural saplings organically emerge out of an eroding schoolhouse.

In this whimsical, imaginary world, composers open a visionary portal to the past and future. In the jazz-infused FIRST CLUB DATE, a world premiere by Aaron Jay Kernis and a Tippet Rise commission, cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Andrea Lam illuminate the musical playground of a boy on the cusp of manhood. The new work is dedicated to Haimovitz and the composer’s cellist-son Jonah, with double-entendre movement titles like “Puppy Love” and “Matt’s Monkish Machinations.” Violinist Caroline Goulding and pianist David Fung embody the youthful spirit of George Enescu’s Impressions from Childhood, while a pastoral mood reigns in Eugène Bozza’s Image for solo flute, performed by Jessica Sindell. An epic expansiveness saturates Red Arc / Blue Veil by John Luther Adams, featuring electronics and a wide array of sounds from pianist Vicky Chow and percussionist Doug Perkins. Opening the album is Jeffrey Kahane’s hopeful America the Beautiful, performed on piano by the composer himself, while works by Chopin and Bach, performed by pianists Yevgeny Sudbin and Anne-Marie McDermott, anchor the program with their sheer beauty and virtuosity. (PENTATONE)

Ian Pace / Simon Limbrick FLOATING DRIFTING

Call your CD Floating, Drifting and numerous reference points will be invoked, from the opening line of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows to that state of weightless grace we have all experienced, where the pressures of the world are at their furthest remove.

For the past twelve years, The Louth Contemporary Music Society have been seeking out such moments of weightless grace in 20th and 21st Century music, and with Floating, Drifting they bring together five transcendent luminous works that, through the remarkable piano playing of Ian Pace, achieve a strange, heightened beauty, precise and pristine in their execution, bright and alive at their heart.

Recorded over three days, in June of 2017, at St Peter’s Church of Ireland, Drogheda, Floating, Drifting is an album structured as a dream-journey, a body floating down a river, that begins, with György Ligeti’s early 1950s composition,  Musica Ricercata: Number 7: that first cold plunge into bright water, light and sparkling on the surface, dark, fast and roiling underneath.

Under a minute long, Michael Zev Gordon’s 2003 miniature, Crystal Clear, might represent a brief moment of realisation and calm, a fleeting clarity, before another long, ever-changing, spectral journey begins, in the form of John Luther Adams’ incredible 2010 work, Four Thousand Holes.

Titled after another Beatles song, A Day In The Life, Adams’ piece inhabits a strange place, somewhere between constant wheeling change, and Zen-like serenity. Working with percussionist  Simon Limbrick, Pace immerses us into a world of strong rise and falling musical currents where, and our mind play tricks on us, picking out imaginary traces of bright possible melodies, like flashes of sunlight glimpsed from the complex swirling depths.

With its wry, tonal allusions to Brahms’ Op. 117 and Schubert’s Op. 142, Luciano Berio’s 1969 composition, Wasserklavier is exactly that sunlight, first glimpsed in the Adams piece, now glinting on the surface of the water. The waters have become calmer but there remains something incomplete, unresolved in Berio’s piece, as if to imply that this calmness is deceptive. We still have far to go. And there is a current deeper down.

That final journey comes with Michael Pisaro’s 2001 composition, Floating Drifting. Exactly 30 minutes in duration (a stopwatch is suggested), and recorded in one take, with silences, it is a piece to be played very softly, the sound present, but just barely. Like John Luther Adams’ Four Thousand Holes, it is also a piece that plays tricks on the listener’s ears, it’s silences, repetitions, and decaying notes suggesting other fragile presences within the floating world.

In Pisaro’s notes on how Floating, Drifting should be played he suggests the pianist approach it “with the fragile character of a nearly invisible ship (perhaps made of glass), drifting on a calm sea.”

For us, and for Ian Pace, it suggest the possible end of an incredible journey, yet also something delicate, elusive, unresolved; at rest, yet still moving. Two decisions suggest themselves: stay here in this new calm, floating world, or jump in and start the journey again.