Recording of the Month
John Adams Naive and Sentimental Music
‘The RSNO’S playing captures all the delicacy, grandeur and zing of John Adams’s complex score’
Adams Absolute Jest; Naive and Sentimental Music
Doric String Quartet;
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/peter Oundjian Chandos CHSA 5199 71.25 mins This recording features outstanding performances of John Adams by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) under Peter Oundjian in his final year as the orchestra’s music director.
Beethoven might strike listeners as unlikely source material for Adams: the American composer’s twinkling, post-minimalist scores are seemingly at odds with the weighty ideals of Teutonic Romanticism. Yet Adams’s Absolute Jest (2011, revised 2012) for string quartet and orchestra is a marvellous musical marriage, by turns reverent and audacious. Drawing on what Adams terms ‘the ecstatic energy’ of Beethoven, Absolute Jest takes flight from the Beethovenian scherzo, recasting quotations from the Ninth Symphony, Diabelli Variations, Waldstein Sonata and the Op. 131 and
Op. 135 quartets (among other works) in a score which is rich in Adams’s vast, glittering textures and soaring melodies.
The RSNO’S playing captures all the delicacy, grandeur and zing of Adams’s complex score, while the Doric String Quartet brings sumptuous sweetness and laser-like clarity to its solo part. The tricky balance between orchestra and quartet that proved particularly challenging in early performances of the work – and now usually sees the quartet amplified in live performance – is here well judged, with the quartet soaring effortlessly across the score’s often dense orchestral textures.
There follows a magnificent reading of Naive and Sentimental Music (1999), a work which borrows its title and conceit from Friedrich Schiller’s
1795 essay Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, which explores the contrast between ‘naive’ (or unconscious) and ‘sentimental’ (or selfreflective and historically aware) approaches to artistic creation. Adams observes that the symphonic reach of this grand orchestral piece is, in Schiller’s sense, ‘a deeply sentimental act’, but also notes that ‘this particular piece, perhaps more than any of my others‚ attempts to allow the naive in me to speak‚ to let it play freely… speaking through the medium of the orchestra has always been a natural and spontaneous gesture for me.’ The result is perhaps Adams’s most ambitious orchestral work since his splendid Harmonielehre (Harmony Lesson) (1985): it is strange, courageous and electrifying.
The RSNO’S playing captures all the delicacy and zing of Adams’s complex score
Scored for symphony orchestra, steel-string guitar, electronic sampler and a battery of unusual percussion, the work is in three substantial movements. The symphony’s opening is
‘an essay on melody’, its everextending tune unfolding across the movement’s gradual acceleration, with the balance of pace and introspection skillfully managed by
Oundjian. Underpinned by a passacaglia-like structure, the second movement is dreamlike with much made of the steelstring guitar line, exquisitely performed by Sean Shibe. The finale, ‘Chain to the Rhythm’, returns to post-minimalist fidget and builds in menace to a tumultuous and, in this fine performance, perfectlycontrolled climax, bringing this excellent disc to a dazzling close. PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★ Hear excerpts and a discussion of this recording on the monthly BBC Music Magazine Podcast available free on itunes or classical-music.com