John Adams’s new piano concerto sashays with flair in world premiere with the San Francisco Symphony

United StatesUnited States Ives, Adams, Orff: Víkingur Ólafsson (piano), Susanna Phillips (soprano), Arnold Livingston Geis (tenor), Will Liverman (baritone), San Francisco Symphony Chorus (director: Jenny Wong), San Francisco Girls Chorus (director: Valérie Saint-Agathe), San Francisco Symphony / David Robertson (conductor). Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco. 16.1.2025. (HS)

Tenor Arnold Livingston Geis enacts the roasted swan in Carmina Burana, as soprano Susanna Phillips flinches © Brandon Patoc

Ives The Unanswered Question
John Adams After the Fall (world premiere)
Orff Carmina Burana

John Adams has composed four piano concertos, not named concertos but still featuring a brilliant soloist in league with a full symphony orchestra. Like his three best-known ones, the world premiere of After The Fall at Davies Hall made apt use of the special talents of the pianists for whom they are written. They also reflect distinct stages of the composer’s style.

Century Rolls, from 1996, when Adams was focused on expanding the possibilities of minimalism, rode on the flexibility and rhythmic vitality of Emmanuel Ax. Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? from 2019, made thrilling use of Yuja Wang’s ability to turn the most intricate technical challenges into vital music riffing against jazz rhythms and big-band interpolations. (The earliest, Eros Piano, from 1989, in the composer’s full minimalist style, was a soft-hued reflection of quiet music for a chamber symphony and is seldom heard these days.)

The new one, After the Fall, features Vîkingur Ólafsson, known for interpretations of J.S. Bach’s keyboard music, with clarity and humanity. The 29-minute concerto actually stems from a brief, nearly note-for-note quotation from Bach’s C minor Prelude from the Well-Tempered Klavier, Book I. Over the first three-quarters of the piece, elements of Bach’s music hide in contrapuntal byplay between the soloist and the orchestra. At times it calls to mind a Brandenburg concerto but with distinctly modern harmonies.

When the quotation from the Prelude arrives, it feels like the music comes home. But it only lasts a few seconds before the orchestra interrupts in a different direction, and we are off on delicious tangents.

Unlike his previous piano concertos, which followed a clearly classical fast-slow-fast form, this one is structured more like a fantasia. Nothing lasts any longer than it needs. No section exceeds more than a minute or two before it moves on to a new thought — stemming from what we just heard but pointing toward something fresh. The result is a thrill ride that brims with tangy harmonies, dazzling pianistic flourishes and, most of all, a panoply of distinctive rhythms.

The piece opens with a cloud of hazy harmonies, against which the pianist enters with chords that rise and fall in the shape of a chant. Eventually it all falls into a rhythm reminiscent of, but not quite, a tango. Counter-melodies bubble up in the orchestra, evolving into a softer sequence, with slow-moving arpeggios in octaves on the piano. Before long, that transitions into nervous, almost angry music that resolves into descending chord sequences on the piano that feel like the inverse of the previously heard arpeggios, and ends up in a softer, slower section.

It can’t stay slow for long, though. A sinister bass line, reminiscent to my ears of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘There was a barber and his wife’ from Sweeney Todd (but again, not quite), morphs into a delightfully sweet tune.

Soon that gathers rhythm and the Bach quotation emerges. Denser harmonies attach themselves to Bach. The piano lines tip over into more dissonant phrases. It all settles into a nervous rhythm and gradually builds into rising chords. The tempo accelerates, and it feels for all the world like we are heading to a big finish. But no, a few contrapuntal jabs from the brass stop the momentum. The piece recedes into a soft caress of a finish, like a jazz ballad.

[l-r] conductor David Robertson, composer John Adams and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson following After the Fall © Brandon Patoc

Through all this, conductor David Robertson kept the elements in perfect balances. Ólafsson, for his part, cut through the orchestral sound with precision and distinct inflections, each episode fashioned with its own sense of style.

Preceding the concerto, Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question set up the back-and-forth aspects of the concerto nicely. The short, 4½-minute piece laid down soft chords in the chamber-size orchestra, over which a solo trumpet, played with appropriate patience by the Symphony’s principal Mark Inouye (unseen behind the back of the choir seats) as a quartet of chattering flutes played music that got increasingly ticked off. The Adams piece created similar waves of emotion, writ much larger.

The second half of the program, Carl Orff’s oh-so-familiar cantata Carmina Burana, missed the mark on several levels. The usually impeccable San Francisco Symphony Chorus flubbed too many entrances. The rhythms in the orchestra often tripped over each other. Robertson’s sense of balance, so perfect in the Adams, went for blaring contrasts in dynamics that felt cheap.

Of the three soloists, the most effective was tenor Arnold Livingston Geis, who made a virtually operatic scene out of the roasted swan song with thrilling high notes and effective acting that had an appropriate touch of humor. Soprano Susanna Phillips caressed most of her alluringly soft music but went off the rails in the climactic moment of ‘Dulcissime’, which was not at all dulce. For the most part, baritone Will Liverman sang well, although his attention was buried in the score.

Harvey Steiman

Leave a Comment