Adams: Harmonium

Adams: Harmonium

Adams: Harmonium
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Music CD Cover

Composer: John Adams
Conductor: Edo de Waart
Orchestra: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Edition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued
CD Release Date: 2000-04-18
Music Label: Ecm Records
Soundtracks:
  1. Part 1: Negative Love
  2. Part 2: Because I Could Not Stop For Death -- Wild Nights

Free Music Notes for Adams: Harmonium

Free Music Review: Outstanding
Hit: 5 Stars

Harmonium is a giant of a work for chorus and large orchestra. In it, John Adams accomplishes the impossible by creating a work that sounds remarkably simple if you allow your attention just to bounce across the surface. When you listen, the work becomes a deeply complex, multi-layered piece. In concert, there's no way you can miss the detail. You can't turn the volume down on forces like this! John Adams sets poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, the latter choice a harrowing vision of death juxtaposed with ecstasy. The setting of the words is quite masterly, confirming John Adams as one of the most accomplished as well as one of the most original voices in music. My only criticism of the cd is its length. There's a single work and the total length is less than 33 minutes.

Adams: Harmonium Poster

Harmonium is John Adams's breakthrough work. After experimenting with a number of different styles, he settled on consonance and simplicity, and became famous upon the work's premiere in 1981. It exemplifies his music--a listener-friendly West Coast minimalism using tasteful, keyboards-enhanced instrumentation and having a generally mellow sound. Adams harmonizes seemingly disparate parts: dense, complex, death-obsessed poems by two very different writers, one by the worldly John Donne and two by the reclusive Emily Dickinson, sung by a choral group rather than soloists. And he makes it work. Unlike the newer Nonesuch recording, this reissued ECM Harmonium retains a sense of something fresh, beginning at a barely perceptible pianissimo, growing through the meditations of "Negative Love" and "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" to the ecstatic, erotically charged crescendo of "Wild Nights," and settling back into calm. Images of artificial forms of transport, including boats, run through the poems. Yet, considering the cover shot of barnacle-laden rocks on the seashore, one imagines Adams's music as portraying, instead, the shifting moods of the ocean itself. Indeed, it is the perfectly natural kind of elevation that Adams's oratorio celebrates, and that Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra remain expert at conveying. --Robert Burns Neveldine

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