Adams: Harmonium
List Price:
Our Price: $14.99
You Save: $2.99 (17%)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Used: from $12.19 (click here)
Category: Music CD
See more new music releases
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Music CD Cover
Composer: John AdamsConductor: 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:
- Part 1: Negative Love
- 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 NeveldineClassical Music CDs
Music Genres
Top music charts in My Proverbial Desert Island Picks
Local Color (Denon)Published: 1987; Music CD
Best price: $24.99
Michael Brecker - Michael BreckerRelease date: 1996-09-24; Music CD
Best price: $9.75
Price in other shops:
John Scofield - Blue MatterRelease date: 1989-08-04; Music CD
Best price: $8.07
Price in other shops:
Round MidnightRelease date: 2002-04-16; Music CD
Best price: $19.95
Wynton Marsalis - Black Codes (From the Underground)Release date: 1990-10-25; Music CD
Best price: $13.55
Adams: HarmoniumRelease date: 2000-04-18; Music CD
Best price: $11.82
Price in other shops:
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense: Special New Edition (1984 Film)Release date: 1999-09-07; Music CD
Best price: $11.23
Price in other shops:
Steel Pulse - True DemocracyRelease date: 2005-06-07; Music CD
Best price: $8.13
Price in other shops:
Pat Metheny Group - TravelsRelease date: 1994-05-10; Music CD
Best price: $22.81
Price in other shops:
Keith Jarrett Trio - Standards, Vol. 2Release date: 2000-04-11; Music CD
Best price: $17.34
Price in other shops:
Top Rated Albums
Road MoviesRelease date: 2004-05-04; Music CD
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
John Adams - El Nino / Hunt-Lieberson, Upshaw, W. White, NaganoRelease date: 2001-08-28; Music CD
Best price: $23.50
Price in other shops:
Naive & Sentimental MusicRelease date: 2002-07-30; Music CD
Best price: $8.45
Price in other shops:
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Centuryby Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2007-10-16; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $18.97
Price in other shops:
Chamber Symphony: Grand PianolaRelease date: 1994-10-25; Music CD
Best price: $11.55
Price in other shops:
On the Transmigration of SoulsRelease date: 2004-08-31; Music CD
Best price: $9.98
Price in other shops:
John Adams - Harmonielehre ? The Chairman Dances ? Tromba lontana ? Short Ride in a Fast Machine / Sir Simon RattleRelease date: 1994-04-12; Music CD
Best price: $9.17
Price in other shops:
Century RollsRelease date: 2001-01-02; Music CD
Best price: $5.19
Price in other shops:
John Adams: HarmonielehreRelease date: 1990-10-25; Music CD
Best price: $10.99
Price in other shops:
John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur/ My Father Knew Charles IvesRelease date: 2006-09-26; Music CD
Best price: $15.78
Price in other shops: