Adams’ ‘Desert’ enthralls
John Luther Adams’ orchestral tone poem “Become Ocean” arrived in 2014 like a belated but welcome news flash. It brought mainstream acclaim — a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, the excited approbation of Taylor Swift — to a composer who had already spent decades establishing himself, a little out of the public eye, as a deft and original musical thinker.
Now comes the companion piece, “Become Desert,” which should do even more to help listeners understand what all the fuss has been about. It’s a 40-minute expanse of shimmering, palpitating musical magic — as beautiful and entrancing a new work as anything to come along in years.
“Become Desert,” which had its first Bay Area performance on Saturday, April 7, during a two-concert visit to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall by the Seattle Symphony and its music director, Ludovic Morlot, is striking for another reason as well. It’s the rare sequel that not only lives up to its predecessor, but far outstrips it in artistic effect.
For listeners who have been somewhat skeptical of “Become Ocean,” with its secondhand Wagnerisms and heavy orchestration, the new work — which had its world premiere in Seattle scarcely two weeks ago — emerges as both a revelation and a vindication. It finds Adams tapping into some of the same formal and textural ideas, but working them through with the intensity and inventiveness that have marked his most powerful creations.
The contrast was drawn with perfect clarity by the fact that Morlot and the orchestra built their second concert, presented by Cal Performances on Sunday, April 8, around “Become Ocean.” To hear the two pieces back-to-back, an inevitable pairing, was to be impressed even more forcefully by the radiance at play in “Become Desert.”
The most immediately noticeable aspect of the piece is its scoring, which deploys several separate ensembles at different locations in the concert hall. Among the players onstage, harps, bells and other percussion are prominent, allowing a silvery palette that punctuates the sustained harmonies of the strings. Brass choirs and a vocal ensemble (Robert Geary’s excellent Volti) hold forth from the side and rear balconies to create an enveloping sound world that is at once cool and welcoming.
Just as remarkable is the landscape that Adams creates with these resources. At one level, not much happens in “Become Desert” — rhythms are almost absent, harmonies are mostly static, and melodies tend to flicker up in little bursts and quickly die away again.
But just below that surface lies a cornucopia of subtly etched detail. Colors shift and fade into one another. About 10 minutes into the piece, to take just one example, there’s a thrilling juncture when the texture grows darker as the French horns, trombones and male voices gradually ease onto the scene and the tinkly percussion evaporates like morning dew.
Adams’ harmonies are similarly evanescent, often promising (or threatening) a simple tonal cadence only to dance away at the last moment.
This is music as visual metaphor, to be sure — you can practically see the broad expanses of desert quivering unreliably in the sunlight, and the piece’s unapologetically palindromic form reads like a hike into the outlands followed by a return trip home. Yet a conceit that can sometimes feel overused emerges here with fresh vigor and delight.
More so, it must be said, than in “Become Ocean,” whose comparable plotlessness feels flat and affectless. “Become Desert” sounds like firsthand observed testimony (Adams makes his home now, after years in Alaska, near the desert of Sonora in Mexico). For “Become Ocean,” he cribs from the opening pages of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and from Debussy’s “La Mer.”
In addition to the Adams diptych, Morlot and the orchestra performed music of Sibelius, including a thick-textured but noble account of the Second Symphony on Saturday, and the suitably watery tone poem “The Oceanides” on Sunday. The weekend’s most persuasive aquatics came on Sunday, with the Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Britten’s “Peter Grimes” — music that catches the play of sun and wave as tellingly as Adams’ new masterpiece evokes the desert.