Hallelujah Junction, the two-disc collection of select tracks by John Adams, earns four stars in The Independent. The composer's "charming and illuminating memoir" of the same name, says the New York Times Sunday Book Review, "is a cogent account of its author’s escape from the world of audience-alienating 'process' music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist ... There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams’s maturity. Indeed, Hallelujah Junction stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures."
Hallelujah Junction, the two-disc collection of select tracks by John Adams, earns four stars in The Independent (UK). Reviewer Andy Gill writes:
This two-disc retrospective tracks Adams's progress from early works like "Shaker Loops," in which he sought refuge from dried-up serialism in a blend of muscular minimalist pulses, through to more mature (yet playful) pieces such as the electric violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur and the clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons, the ensemble for which references the full range of the American musical demotic by incorporating banjo, accordion and sampled cows.
Read more from the album review at independent.co.uk.
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The "charming and illuminating memoir" of the same name, writes David Hajdu in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, a book that is
Adams’s first (and, let’s hope, not his last), is a cogent account of its author’s escape from the world of audience-alienating "process" music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist ... There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams’s maturity. Indeed, Hallelujah Junction stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures.
Hajdu concludes: "With Hallelujah Junction, Adams has put in prose an argument against the ideology of aesthetic continuum, a case that his music has always articulated eloquently by example."
Read the complete book review at nytimes.com.
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In The Telegraph (UK) review of the book, Christopher Hawtree writes that the composer's "body of work continually yields more. Adams is continually questioning." Hawtree concludes: "Adams suggests that Frank Zappa's memoirs stand alongside Berlioz's as "one of the few genuinely original literary works about music"; Hallelujah Junction is in their vicinity." Read that review at telegraph.co.uk.
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Playbill has a detailed account of the new production of Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, which recently brought the composer his Metropolitan Opera debut. Writer Thomas May says:
Adams, one of today's most successful and frequently performed composers, has developed a reputation for mining the tremendous mythic and symbolic potential of contemporary stories and events. At the same time, his colorful and sensuous music appeals to audiences in a way rarely achieved by a 21st-century composer ...
In Doctor Atomic, May explains,
Adams’s music generates a momentum of present-tense anticipation through its ingenious manipulation of rhythmic energy and richly colorful orchestration (including an electronic soundscape). Among the complex score’s many challenges is sustaining the hallucinatory sequence that threads through the final act, as the countdown dissolves into the musical equivalent of relativity.
Read the complete article at playbill.com.
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Adams was a guest on today's episode of WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show. You can access the segment online in the show's archives at wnyc.org.
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