This past Friday, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at Stanford University, and, writes Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Swed, the piece is "a chip off the old block." The composer wrote his original Chamber Symphony in 1992 while studying Schoenberg and overhearing the Carl Stalling–penned score coming from the Looney Tunes cartoons his son was watching in the other room, but the new piece, writes Swed, "is pure Adams."
This past Friday, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at Stanford University, and, writes Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Swed, the piece is "a chip off the old block." The composer wrote his original Chamber Symphony in 1992 while studying Schoenberg and overhearing the Carl Stalling–penned score coming from the Looney Tunes cartoons his son was watching in the other room, but the new piece, writes Swed, "is pure Adams."
The composer's signature style "has never [been] done ... more engagingly" than in the new piece, "in which an ornate melody begun by flute and clarinet blooms into a complex, richly imagined hothouse orchard." But, reports Swed, the piece is "feisty" as well, perhaps, he posits, as a nod to Alarm Will Sound, the adventurous ensemble for whom it was written. The group, led by Alan Pierson, premiered the piece on Friday on a program that also featured electronica by Aphex Twin and works Nancarrow, Ligeti and Birtwistle.
The feistiness in Son of Chamber Symphony may also be manifested in the challenge it poses those playing it. The third movement is an orchestration of a piece Adams wrote for Kronos Quartet to play at Peter Sellars's 50th birthday earlier this year, and about the piece as a whole, Swed writes:
Son is as difficult as his original chamber symphony, if not more so. The first movement sets out to the accompaniment of a rhythmic motif lifted from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, then nervously yet confidently scurries all over the place, changing meters all the time. Absorbing its interesting details will require many listenings. The last movement is one of those Adams bucking-bronco blastoffs, riveting and full of surprises.
Alarm Will Sound will give Son of Chamber Symphony its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 28, and a dance by Mark Morris set to the piece is in the works as well. "But even without such insurance," says Swed, "a kid with these goods should have no problem making his way in the world."
To read Swed's Los Angeles Times review, visit calendarlive.com.
