Subscription Concert A Series

Subscription Concert No.993 A Series

This concert is over. Date: Fri. 19. January 2024 19:00 (18:00)

Venue: Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Venue Info Seat

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Artists

John ADAMS, Conductor
Esmé Quartet, String Quartet*

Profile

John ADAMS (Composer/Conductor)

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes; his stage compositions, many in collaboration with director Peter Sellars, have transformed the genre of contemporary music theatre. Spanning more than three decades, works such as Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, El Niño and Nixon in China are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music.

As a conductor Adams has led the world’s major orchestras, programming his own works with a wide variety of repertoire ranging from Beethoven, Mozart and Debussy to Sibelius, Ives, Carter, and Ellington. Among his honorary doctorates are those from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern and Cambridge universities and from The Juilliard School. A provocative writer, he is author of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Since 2009 Adams has been Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing age ten and his first orchestral pieces were performed while he was still a teenager. In 2017 Adams celebrated his 70th birthday with festivals of his music in Europe and the US, including special retrospectives at London’s Barbican, Cité de la Musique in Paris, and in Amsterdam, New York and Geneva, among other cities. In 2019 he was the recipient of both Spain’s BBVA ‘“Frontiers of Knowledge’ ” award and Holland’s Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science”, and in 2021 he was appointed ‘“Honorary Academician’” by the prestigious General Assembly of the Academicians of Santa Cecilia, also receiving the ‘“Glashütte Original MusicFestivalAward’” from the Dresden Music Festival in recognition of his lifetime achievement. Adams is currently at work on his fifth opera.

Conducting engagements in 2021/22 include return visits to The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle and St Louis symphony orchestras. In Europe Adams will appear with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra – reuniting with Icelandic pianist Vikingur Ólafsson for performances of Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? – as well as the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Lahti Symphony orchestras. Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival in 2021, its 75th anniversary year, he also takes part in the 2022 Colorado Music and Cincinnati May festivals.

Recent conducting highlights include performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (world premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No.12 ‘“Lodger’”), The Philadelphia Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. With the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France Adams gave the European premiere of Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? together with Ólafsson in February 2020, and in 2018 he conducted the Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia for the first time in performances of The Gospel According to the Other Mary.

Recent recordings include Grammy-nominated albums Doctor Atomic (featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers conducted by Adams, with Gerald Finley and Julia Bullock) and Scheherazade.2, a dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra written for Leila Josefowicz, as well as Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (written for and performed by Yuja Wang, together the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel) and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s ‘“John Adams Edition’”, a box set comprising seven of his works, conducted by Rattle, Dudamel, Petrenko, Gilbert and Adams.

Esmé Quartet (String Quartet)

Wonhee Bae - 1st Violin / Yuna Ha - 2ndViolin / Dimitri Murrath – Viola / Yeeun Heo - Cello

The Esmé Quartet is a string quartet, formed in 2016 at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany by four Korean musicians. The ensemble takes its name from an Old French word meaning ‘being loved‘.
Winning the first prize and sweeping four of the special prizes, among them the Mozart and Beethoven prizes, at the 2018 London Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition the Esmé Quartet made a sensational entrance into the string quartet world. Subsequently, they were invited and started touring internationally playing concerts at festivals and concert halls such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the Wigmore Hall and throughout the UK, at the Flagey Musiq3 Festival in Brussels and Classic Esterházy in Eisenstadt, Austria.
They recorded their debut CD with works by Beethoven, Unsuk Chin, and Frank Bridge on the label Alpha Classics. The recording was released in early 2020 and has achieved critical acclaim with a 5 star review from Diapason d’Or. In 2022 the quartet will perform on tour for the first time in North America and Japan.

Photo: ©Jeremy Visuals Photography

Program

John Adams: I Still Dance (2019) [Japan Premiere］

Program Notes
John Adams: Absolute Jest (2011) *

Program Notes
John Adams: Harmonielehre (1984-85)

Program Notes

Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in celebration of its 100th anniversary.

　First performed March 15, 2012 by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, with the St. Lawrence String Quartet (Geoff Nuthall, Scott St. John, Lesley Robertson, Christopher Costanza), Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco.

　A revised version was given its first performance December 1, 2012 by the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, conducted by the composer and also featuring the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

　The idea for “Absolute Jest” was suggested by a performance by Michael Tilson Thomas of Stravinskyʼs “Pulcinella,” a piece that Iʼd known all my life but had never much paid attention to until hearing MTT conduct it. Hearing this (and knowing that I was already committed to composing something for the San Francisco Symphonyʼs 100th anniversary) I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language.
　But there the comparison pretty much ends. Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets since I was a teenager, and crafting something out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135 and the Große Fuge (plus a few more familiar “tattoos” from his symphonic scherzos) was a totally spontaneous act for me.
　“String quartet and orchestra” is admittedly a repertoire black hole − is there a single work in that medium that is regularly heard? And there are good reasons for why this is. The first is a simple issue of furniture: the problem of placing four solo players in the “soloist” position but still in front of the podium (so that they can follow the conductor) is daunting. The inner players, the second violin and viola, are frequently lost to the audience both visually and aurally.
　But placement on the stage aside, the real challenge is in marrying the highly charged manner and sound of a string quartet to the mass and less precise texture of the large orchestra. Unless very skillfully handled by both composer and performers, the combining of these two ensembles can result in a feeling of sensory and expressive overload.

　At its premiere in March of 2012 the first third of the piece was largely a trope on the Opus 131 C# minor quartetʼs scherzo and suffered from just this problem. After a moody opening of tremolo strings and fragments of the Ninth Symphony signal octave-dropping motive the solo quartet emerged as if out of a haze, playing the driving foursquare figures of that scherzo, material that almost immediately went through a series of strange permutations.
　This original opening never satisfied me. The clarity of the solo quartetʼs role was often buried beneath the orchestral activity resulting in what sounded to me too much like “chatter.” And the necessity of slowing down Beethovenʼs tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to make certain orchestral passages negotiable detracted from it vividness and breathless energy.
　Six months after the premiere I decided to compose a different beginning to Absolute Jest − a full 400 bars of completely new music, replacing the “quadrangular” feel of the Opus 131 scherzo with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that launches the piece in what is to my ears a far more satisfying fashion.

　The rolling 6/8 patterns recall the same Ninth Symphony scherzo but also summon up other references − of the Hammerklavier Sonata, of the Eighth Symphony and other archetypal Beethoven motives that come and go like cameo appearances on a stage.
　The high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the F major Opus 135 (Beethovenʼs final work in that medium) enters about a third of the way through Absolute Jest and becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow section that interweaves fragments of the Große Fuge with the opening fugue theme of the C# minor quartet. A final furious coda features the solo string quartet charging ahead at full speed over an extended orchestral pedal based on the famous Waldstein Sonata harmonic progressions.

　Absolute Jest had elicited mixed responses from listeners on its first outing. Quite a few reviewers assumed, perhaps because of its title, that the piece was little more than a backslapping joke. (One Chicago journalist was offended and could only express disgust at the abuse of Beethovenʼs great music.)
　There is nothing particularly new about one composer internalizing the music of another and “making it his own.” Composers are drawn to anotherʼs music to the point where they want to live in it, and that can happen in a variety of fashions, whether itʼs Brahms making variations on themes by Handel or Haydn, Liszt arranging Wagner or Beethoven for piano, Schoenberg crafting a concerto out of Monn or, more radically, Berio “deconstructing” Schubert.
　But Absolute Jest is not a clone of Grand Pianola Music or my Chamber Symphony. Of course there are “winks”, some of them not entirely subtle, here and there in the piece. But the act of composing the work (one that took nearly a year of work) was the most extended experience in pure “invention” that Iʼve ever undertaken. Its creation was for me a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design. The “jest” of the title should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning, “gesta:” doings, deeds, exploits. I like to think of “jest” as indicating an exercising of oneʼs wit by means of imagination and invention.

Program notes by John Adams

Ⅰ First movement
Ⅱ The Anfortas Wound
Ⅲ Meister Eckhardt and Quackie

　Commissioned as part of the Meet the Composer Orchestra residency program and funded by Exxon Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

　First performed March 21, 1985 by the San Francisco Symphony, Edo de Waart, conductor, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco

　Harmonielehre is roughly translated as “the book of harmony” or “treatise on harmony.” It is the title of a huge study of tonal harmony, part textbook, part philosophical rumination, that Arnold Schoenberg published in 1911 just as he was embarking on a voyage into unknown waters, one in which he would more or less permanently renounce the laws of tonality. My own relationship to Schoenberg needs some explanation. Leon Kirchner, with whom I studied at Harvard, had himself been a student of Schoenberg in Los Angeles during the 1940s. Kirchner had no interest in the serial system that Schoenberg had invented, but he shared a sense of high seriousness and an intensely critical view of the legacy of the past. Through Kirchner I became highly sensitized to what Schoenberg and his art represented. He was a “master” in the same sense that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms were masters. That notion in itself appealed to me then and continues to do so. But Schoenberg also represented to me something twisted and contorted. He was the first composer to assume the role of high-priest, a creative mind whose entire life ran unfailingly against the grain of society, almost as if he had chosen the role of irritant. Despite my respect for and even intimidation by the persona of Schoenberg, I felt it only honest to acknowledge that I profoundly disliked the sound of twelve-tone music. His aesthetic was to me an overripening of 19th century Individualism, one in which the composer was a god of sorts, to which the listener would come as if to a sacramental altar. It was with Schoenberg that the “agony of modern music” had been born, and it was no secret that the audience for classical music during the twentieth century was rapidly shrinking, in no small part because of the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written.
　It is difficult to understand why the Schoenbergian model became so profoundly influential for classical composers. Composers like Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti have borne both the ethic and the aesthetic into our own time, and its immanence in present day university life and European musical festivals is still potent. Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines, and freeing myself from the model he represented was an act of enormous will power. Not surprisingly, my rejection took the form of parody… not a single parody, but several extremely different ones. In my Chamber Symphony the busy, hyperactive style of Schoenbergʼs own early work is placed in a salad spinner with Hollywood cartoon music. In The Death of Klinghoffer the priggish, disdainful Austrian Woman describes how she spent the entire hijacking hiding under her bed by singing in a Sprechstimme to the accompaniment of a Pierrot-like ensemble in the pit.
　My own Harmonielehre is parody of a different sort in that it bears a “subsidiary relation” to a model (in this case a number of signal works from the turn of the century like Gurrelieder and the Sibelius Fourth Symphony), but it does so without the intent to ridicule. It is a large, three-movement work for orchestra that marries the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle late Romanticism. It was a conceit that could only be attempted once. The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece. This is a work that looks at the past in what I suspect is “postmodernist” spirit, but, unlike Grand Pianola Music or Nixon in China, it does so entirely without irony.

　The first part is a seventeen-minute inverted arch form: high energy at the beginning and end, with a long, roaming “Sehnsucht” section in between. The pounding e minor chords at the beginning and end of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image Iʼd shortly before starting the piece. In the dream Iʼd watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket. At the time (1984 - 85) I was still deeply involved in the study of C. G. Jungʼs writings, particularly his examination of Medieval mythology. I was deeply affected by Jungʼs discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression. In this slow, moody movement entitled “The Anfortas Wound” a long, elegiac trumpet solo floats over a delicately shifting screen of minor triads that pass like spectral shapes from one family of instruments to the other. Two enormous climaxes rise up out of the otherwise melancholy landscape, the second one being an obvious homage to Mahlerʼs last, unfinished symphony.
　The final part, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie” begins with a simple berceuse (cradlesong) that is as airy, serene and blissful as “The Anfortas Wound” is earthbound, shadowy and bleak. The Zappaesque title refers to a dream Iʼd had shortly after the birth of our daughter, Emily, who was briefly dubbed “Quackie” during her infancy. In the dream, she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals. The tender berceuse gradually picks up speed and mass (not unlike “The Negative Love” movement of Harmonium) and culminates in a tidal wave of brass and percussion over a pedal point on E-flat major.

　The recording by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony was made only three days after the world premiere in March of 1985. (I have since revised the ending.) Despite the daunting length and rhythmic complexity of the piece, both conductor and orchestra made a totally convincing representation of it, and the recording can testify to the rare instances when a composer, a conductor, and an orchestra create an inexplicable bond among each other.

Program notes by John Adams

【Soloist Encore】（1/19up）
arr.by Stephan Koncz :
A New Satiesfaction (feat. Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1)
　（Esmé Quartet, String Quartet）

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