Fearful Symmetries/The Wound-Dresser
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Music CD Cover
Performer: Sanford SylvanComposer: John Adams
Conductor: John Adams
Orchestra: Orchestra of St. Luke's
Performer: Christopher Gekker
Performer: Naoko Tanaka
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1989-10-20
Music Label: Nonesuch
Soundtracks:
- The Wound-Dresser
- Fearful Symmetries
Free Music Notes for Fearful Symmetries/The Wound-Dresser
Free Music Review: Listen and listen again
Hit: 5 Stars
The Wound-Dresser and Fearful Symmetries make a rather strange couple, the former reflective, dark and sombre, the latter an apparently trivial, pop-genre piece. Do look deeper than this. The Wound-Dresser is a song for baritone and orchestra. The soloist, Sanford Sylvan, lives up to his highly appropriate surname. His clarity of delivery and, especially, diction are a joy. His light vibrato endows his voice with a surface like planed wood. This is not music that will grab you by the throat and make you listen. Like any good friend, it's something you will have to get to know on its own terms. The words are by Walt Whitman and describe healing the wounded and sick in the American Civil War. Weighty stuff, and weightily handled. But yet, a friend of mine borrowed the cd some years ago. He knew nothing of John Adams and not much more about late twentieth century music. I had to go and get it back from him. Effectively, he complained to me because he had not been able to stop listening to this piece. He said he had played it almost continuously for the whole fortnight. He admitted he had never got to the second piece. Fearful Symmetries, on the surface, sounds like it comes from a different universe. It doesn't. It took me some time to get beyond the opening section. Like my friend, I was so captivated by the Wound-Dresser, I simply wanted to start it again when the highly contrasting rhythms of the second piece began. But there is much more to this piece. The saxophones immediately state their cool tone. There's also a drum beat, though light. Overall the writing for wind is virtuosic. It shares with its cousin, The Chairman Dances from Nixon in China, an apparently light approach to quite profound experience. If you ever get past the Wound-Dresser, you will find another wholly satisfying musical idea.
Fearful Symmetries/The Wound-Dresser Poster
This 1989 release became an unexpected surprise hit, primarily because of the extraordinary tone poem The Wound Dresser. Written to Walt Whitman's poem of the same name, it deals with Whitman's musings on the Civil War. There is hardly a hint of Adams's traditional (and usually blithe) minimalistic impulses here. This is the "dark" side of the composer that is to surface later in his opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Fearful Symmetries, the companion piece here, is more typical of Adams; it's a junkyard rattle of catchy rhythms and clever orchestral textures--a work made almost trivial by The Wound Dresser. --Paul CookClassical Music CDs
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