American composer John Adams turns 70 this month. The transplanted New Englander, longtime California resident and citizen of the world is back in the city for a birthday celebration with the San Francisco Symphony. He is also finishing his score for the San Francisco Opera-commissioned Girls of the Golden West with frequent collaborator director-librettist Peter Sellars, set for a world premiere in the 2017-18 season. Two weeks of SFS concerts, currently in progress, feature relatively late compositions, so fans and admirers will have to wait for a retrospective. Adams is still too busy to spend much time looking back.
Getting things started with a SoundBox Emergent program that he curated and hosted himself, the composer-conductor looked on the following week as conductor Grant Gershon and director Elkhanah Pulitzer presented the first SFS performances of his fiercely challenging The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012).
This week violinist Leila Josefowicz joins Michael Tilson Thomas for a concert that balances selections from Romeo and Juliet with Adams' Scheherazade.2 . It's touted as "a Grammy Award-winning evening": MTT won for the Prokofiev, Josefowicz was nominated for Scheherazade.2 , and Adams has bagged five of the awards himself. He also got a Pulitzer in 2003 for On the Transmigration of Souls , but who's counting?
In the complicated world of contemporary classical music, Adams continues to find crossover appeal. While his works usually elicit the gamut of critical response, he still delights and shocks listeners with each new composition. The recent SoundBox menu showed Adams' generosity to new writers. Andrew Norman's chamber work Try, conducted by Adams in its 2011 premiere, pleased the crowd and signaled an interesting new voice, but the two-piano performance of Hallelujah Junction featuring Orli Shaham and Molly Morkoski, selections from John's Book of Alleged Dances, and the concert-closing Ragamarole (after more than four decades of neglect), with pianist Robin Sutherland tickling the ivories, supplied the best energy of the night.
The Gospel According to the Other Mary , with a libretto compiled by Peter Sellars from texts and poems of feminist writers and social activists, shows Adams at his most inventive and uncompromising. It is a long and tough experience, filled with gut-wrenching emotion and passages of almost hallucinatory elation, unafraid to test the listener's concentration or understanding. This is Adams at full-tilt maturity, and it provides serious proof of his edgy intellectual evolution. Always admired for skills in orchestration and a natural feeling for seductive rhythms and tunes, The Other Mary shows Adams in a much starker light.
No one expects a Passion oratorio to be an easy ride, and judging by the number of people who bailed at intermission and the slow stream of attendees leaving throughout the performance, many listeners just couldn't handle it. I understand. There are a few longueurs in the score, and it is quite an endurance test, but for all who remained to the end, it had the very effect I suspect was intended. Uneasy catharsis and a halting sense of solace are actually a pretty big result. We stumbled back into the night with renewed faith in the power of music to provoke and reward, and further awe at the sheer integrity of Adams' genius.
Elkhanah Pulitzer's (we know her best from SF Opera Lab) staging was minimalist as an early Adams score, and she made telling points with indelible character groupings and a scenic economy of means. That bare lightbulb in Act II was a literally brilliant idea. Seth Reiser's lighting and Christine Crook (costume designer) and Sibilla Carini (associate costume designer) helped to create a compelling atmosphere.
Ragnar Bohlin's SFS Chorus was magnificent in important contributions requiring a dauntingly wide range of expression. From start to finish, they provided an electric charge of theatricality.
A trio of countertenors reminiscent of the Adams/Sellars Nativity oratorio El Nino, Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Nathan Medley delivered the text with an ethereal purity that was also amazingly enunciated. The supertitles were helpful throughout the night, but they were mainly needed to explain the action rather than display the words.
As the sisters Mary (conflated with Mary Magdalene) and Martha, transported to a modern shelter for women, mezzo-sopranos Kelley O'Connor and Tamara Mumford displayed not only strong vocal technique and acting skills, but also remarkable stamina. Tenor Jay Hunter Morris as Lazarus, their brother, was a little more effortful, but his singing in the exquisite Passover scene (evidence of Adams' ability with an almost pop idiom) was affecting, and he was never less than a powerful presence.
The orchestra and conductor Grant Gershon were wonderful in the orchestral interludes, and the percussion punctuating the narrative was exciting. The use of cimbalom (hammered dulcimer) and the klezmer wail of the clarinet spiced the texture with a haunting blend of ancient and modern sounds.
Scheherazade.2 is also a feminist take on an old story: the legendary dream-weaver faces the perils of a male-dominant culture. Adams gives her a voice both seductive and defiant. Violinist Leila Josefowicz is just the woman to take the part. (SFS, 2/22-25)