John Adams led the Juilliard Opera Center in a concert performance of his 1991opera The Death of Klinghoffer on Saturday night, the culmination of Juilliard's FOCUS! 2009 festival. The distance of a new generation of performers "allowed this searing, mystical and ambitious work to come through without the doctrinaire baggage that has attached to it over the years," writes the New York Times's Anthony Tommasini. "What came through here, for me, was that this is one of Mr. Adams’s most intricate, entrancing and impressive scores. With these sympathetic young performers Mr. Adams was able to present it the way he envisioned it, or so it seemed as he took bows during the long ovation."
John Adams led the Juilliard Opera Center in a concert performance of his opera The Death of Klinghoffer on Saturday night, the culmination of Juilliard's FOCUS! 2009 festival celebrating a century of music from California. The New York Times's classical music critic Anthony Tommasini writes that the seminal 1991 piece, which proved controversial from its inception, has only gained new depth with the passage of time and the distance of a new generation of performers, allowing "this searing, mystical and ambitious work to come through without the doctrinaire baggage that has attached to it over the years."
The Death of Klinghoffer tells of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by members of the Palestine Liberation Front, leading to the murder of the wheelchair-bound American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, and examines various facets of the ongoing Palestinian-Israel conflict.
"Somehow the performers here," says Tommasini of the Juilliard concert, "too young to have been aware of the polemics the opera initially incited, brought unjaded involvement and affecting commitment to their work."
The piece opens with two different choral movements: the Chorus of the Exiled Palestinians and the Chorus of the Exiled Jews. Tommasini describes them this way:
As the Palestinians tell of their suffering, the vocal lines in the chorus are set with elegiac lyricism, rich with melismas that extend the phrases exotically. The orchestra churns quietly yet nervously beneath, as a lacy, restless violin line threads through the music until the last phrases, when the Palestinians vent their anger, and the music erupts with jagged, pummeling, harmonically piercing fury. The choral writing for the exiled Jews is thickly textured, enshrouded with luminous yet pointedly astringent harmonies.
After Saturday's performance, the reviewer concludes, "What came through here, for me, was that this is one of Mr. Adams’s most intricate, entrancing and impressive scores. With these sympathetic young performers Mr. Adams was able to present it the way he envisioned it, or so it seemed as he took bows during the long ovation."
Read the complete concert review at nytimes.com, where you'll also find the archival reviews of the opera's world premiere in Brussels, March 1991, and its subsequent US premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September of that year.
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