John Adams concludes his residency with the San Francisco Symphony, part of the orchestra's Project San Francisco, when he leads members of the orchestra in a performance of his chamber music this Sunday. On the program are Road Movies, Shaker Loops, Hallelujah Junction, as well as Adams's String Quartet, which will be performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, for whom the composer wrote the piece in 2008.

The San Francisco Symphony recently announced its 2011-12 centennial season, which will include Absolute Jest, a world premiere commission by John Adams, featuring the St. Lawrence, as part of the American Mavericks festival in 2012. The orchestra will then bring American Mavericks concerts and events to audiences in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and New York's Carnegie Hall in a two-week tour. The season also includes performances of Adams's Two Fanfares for Orchestra: Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Tromba lontana by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic October 23 and 24, 2011. For more information on the SFS centennial season, visit sfsymphony.org.

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Adams's residency with the SFS this season began at the beginning of the month, when he lead the orchestra in three performances of his 2000 Nativity oratorio, El Niño, at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall. The oratorio was composed in celebration of the millennium and commissioned by the SFS, which gave the piece its US premiere in 2001. Featured in this months' concerts were sopranos Dawn Upshaw, one of El Niño’s original interpreters, and Jessica Rivera, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and Steven Rickards, bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman called it "a triumphant return" to San Francisco, bringing with it a "taste of the miraculous" even all these years later.

"It isn't just that the score is so dramatically inventive, so sweepingly beautiful and so resourceful in its treatment of religious myths and literary text, although all that is true," Kosman explains. "What's astonishing about El Niño is the boldness with which it claims a place alongside Handel's Messiah."

Kosman goes on to say that the "music is as ravishing as ever" and "the score now stands proudly as one of Adams' greatest achievements."

Read the complete review at sfgate.com.

San Jose Mercury News critic Richard Scheinin is similarly effusive in his review of the performances, which he describes as "extraordinary." 

Sheinin too finds that a decade after it's premiere, El Niño "stands as one of Adams's marvels." The piece, he writes, "easily integrates the many aspects of Adams' compositional palette, blooming into vast, golden sun-explosions at one moment, getting down with industrial-strength rhythm riffs in the next. At its best moments, and there are many, the profusions of detail in the score not only mimic natural phenomena, but give the illusion of worlds being born—not a bad illusion to conjure in the most famous birth story of all time."

Read the full review at mercurynews.com.

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As part of the Project San Francisco focus on John Adams, SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas led the orchestra in performances of the composer’s 1985 SFS commission Harmonielehre Wednesday and Thursday of this week. The composition was inspired by a dream Adams had in which he was driving across the Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like a rocket. The SFS performed the world premiere of Harmonielehre in March 1985 under the direction of then-music director Edo de Waart.

In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kosman called Wednesday's concert "a powerhouse performance" in which "this brilliant and dynamic opus emerged with all its force intact."

Harmonielehre, Kosman explains, "marked the birth of Adams' distinctive musical voice; for those of us who feel that there is no other living American composer who has forged such a compelling blend of past and present, Harmonielehre is where it all begins."

Read the review at sfgate.com.

In the Mercury News, Scheinin calls the piece "big and outrageous, a spectacle in sound, a controlled series of explosions and more. Like Mahler, it's obsessive, with its sense of blasting through structures, pushing limits, accessing dreams, courting worlds of anguish and cosmic healing, and finally reaching the sounds of heaven."

Scheinin goes on to describe the piece as "epic," a scale matched by the performers and their conductor, all of which created "one of those capital-E events that music lovers are constantly craving."

Read the concert review at mercurynews.com.

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To pick up a copy of any of the albums in John Adams's Nonesuch catalog, which begins with the 1986 release of Harmonielehre by the San Francisco Symphony under conductor Edo de Waart, head to the Nonesuch Store, where all CDs, LPs, and DVDs are now 33% off during the store's 3rd anniversary sale.