John Adams' latest recording on Nonesuch, Doctor Atomic Symphony, is out now. The Guardian describes the piece's final movement as Adams "at his most brilliant"; the Telegraph too commends the entire work's "sheer brilliance." The BBC says that David Robertson and the Saint Louis Orchestra "take a robustly muscular and rooted approach to Adams’ multi-layered, intricately woven latticework of sounds and colours leavened by flights of poetic fancy and fantasy ... music that seems fervently alive to both felt and imagined experience."
John Adams was in London this past weekend to lead the London Sinfonietta in the UK premiere of his Son of Chamber Symphony, Sunday night night at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall. The Guardian's George Hall points to the piece's final movement in particular, recognizing it as music where "Adams is at his most brilliant." It features an "unfailingly skillful" reworking of themes from the Nixon in China aria "News has a kind of mystery," says Hall, "source material with which Adams then runs free with an unstoppable momentum that achieves exhilaration." The concert review can be found at guardian.co.uk.
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In the Daily Telegraph, reviewer Ivan Hewett says that while concert's all-American program was interesting, its other pieces "were blown out of the water by the sheer brilliance of John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony." Hewett describes it as "all sunshine, bowling along with irresistible energy and Haydn-like wit." It was a sentiment expressed in the Sinfonietta's performance. Says Hewett: "The players clearly relished the music themselves, and played like a dream."
Read the review at telegraph.co.uk.
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Doctor Atomic Symphony, Adams's orchestral distillation of music from his 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, about the intense moments before the detonation of the first atomic bomb, received its first recording by the Saint Louis Symphony and music director David Robertson, released on Nonesuch this summer.
In the BBC album review, writer Michael Quinn works his way through the piece—from its opening movement, which "seethes with a turbulent energy," to the last, with its setting of the opera's "heart-stopping aria 'Batter My Heart'" for "evocative solo trumpet"—concluding that "the dark profundity of the subject is foregrounded in characteristically complex, tightly woven musical ideas."
Guide to Strange Places, the companion piece on the album, "proves a surprisingly apt coupling" with Doctor Atomic Symphony, says Quinn. He describes it as "mysterious and intense," in the vein of Ives’s Central Park in the Dark.
For both pieces on the album, Robertson and the orchestra "take a robustly muscular and rooted approach to Adams’ multi-layered, intricately woven latticework of sounds and colours leavened by flights of poetic fancy and fantasy," Quinn commends. "Recorded live, there’s an emphatic urgency to the playing, wholly in keeping with music that seems fervently alive to both felt and imagined experience."
Read the complete review at bbc.co.uk.
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