A few years ago, during the Ojai Music Festival in California, pianist Vikingur Olafsson was having a few beers with composer John Adams when he said this: you?
Adams paused for a few seconds, took a sip, and replied, “I guess so.”
“And that was it,” Olafsson said in an interview. One of today's most intelligent and expressive pianists brokered a deal with one of the world's great composers with a casual comment. The resulting 30-minute concerto, “After the Fall,'' will be premiered at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on Thursday.
San Francisco, near Adams' home in Berkeley, is just the first stop on the tour. Nine commissioners are participating from cities including Paris, London, Los Angeles and Vienna. Olafsson has programmed “After the Fall” elsewhere, guaranteeing wide exposure in the near future.
“It means a lot to me as a composer to have a top-level artist like Vikingr pick up a piece and really engage with it,” Adams said. If we want our art to have a future, we need people to have that kind of passionate dedication to it. ”
Olafsson said he wasn't motivated by a sense of obligation to turn “After the Fall” into a show. He just loves Adams' music and wants to internalize it like a Mozart or Ravel concerto.
“I want to feel like when I play music I become the music, just like an actor becomes the character he plays,” he said. “But it takes a lot of time.”
That's because Olafsson enthusiastically played Adams' early piano concertos, including “Century Rolls” (1996), written for Emanuel Ax, and “Does the Devil Have All the Good Songs?” Being there also helps. (2018), written for Yuja Wang. Like them, “After the Fall” also has a poetic yet evocative title. Adams discussed the origin of the name and details of the score in a joint interview with Olafsson. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What brought you guys together?
John Adams We met in Paris just before the pandemic shut everything down. I was able to do “The Devil Must Have All the Good Songs?'' but I don't think I'm really confident in my songs until I try to conduct them. I had heard about this wonderful Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Ólafsson, but we didn't know much about each other. But we did it in Paris and have been doing it ever since. It was the beginning not only of our collaboration, but also of a truly great friendship.
VIKINGUR OLAFSSON I've been listening to your music since I was 13 years old. My father is a composer and architect and spends all his time at work designing houses to listen to the best new music. So he basically introduced John's music to me at the same time that I discovered Stravinsky.
How is “After the Fall” different from Adams' other piano concertos?
Olafsson They have a common brilliance. I think “Century Roll” is a very fun work. When I played it, I remember connecting it to Maurice Ravel, but I didn't think about Ravel in “Does the Devil Have All the Good Songs?” It's clearly a masterpiece, but it's a much darker piece of work and much more tense.
When looking at this new concerto score, I was certainly reminded of Ravel, in its architecture and craftsmanship, and its delight in detail. But this element is also present in the third movement, which revolves around the visit of a certain Johann Sebastian.
The piece ends with a kind of fantasy based on Bach's C minor Prelude from Volume 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Olafsson It's very convincing and unlike anything I've played or heard before. It feels like entering a house you've never been to. It's all a strange paradox. You enter a place where you feel as if you recognize yourself there. And it's yours in a way, but you've never been there before.
What is the story behind the title?
Here are some quotations from Adams Boulez's “Music Lessons'', a huge collection of lectures he gave at the Collège de France. And he essentially paints a kind of dystopian picture of modern times, where the avant-garde is exhausted. No more ideas. There's nothing fresh, so we just have to go back and dig up the past. I read it as a somewhat Miltonic scene, like autumn in the Garden of Eden.
At the same time, my son Sam wrote a piano concerto, which was also premiered in San Francisco, hence the pun in the title. The song is called “No Such Spring,” so there's a bit of a joke in there.
≠But we're working in a kind of post-avant-garde era, and I've been working on it for a long time, but we stop and ask ourselves about the relevance of what we're doing, especially when pop In popular culture. Music is breathtakingly omnipresent and omnipotent. Are we living in a post-collapse era, or is this really a time when ideas that were first discovered 200, 300, 400 years ago can be used to do something very meaningful? mosquito?
A composer like Busoni would say that the past must always influence the present.
Adams: There was a David Hockney exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. One room had a very strong influence on me, and it wasn't his painting. The room was covered from floor to ceiling with pictures that were meaningful to him. It was everything: pictures of sculptures, photographs, travel magazines, paintings. And I realized that's where I've been all my life. I discovered that these signals had meaning, and although many of them were familiar to the listener, I created a new language from them.
How would you describe the shape of “After the Fall”?
The Olafsson score is very sophisticated and energetic at the same time. It also feels very short. The slow movements make it feel like a 15-minute concerto, and it's probably my favorite. It's slow, but very light. There are actually a lot of notes, but it's a bit ballet-like. I think another reason is the internal structure of the piece, the counterpoint, and the use of motifs for structure construction. In that sense, it flies by as you keep hearing familiar motives in new settings and harmonic contexts.
There is a sudden climax at the end of the song, followed by a quiet harp sound. What do you think about it?
Adams I keep a diary about my work, and it's interesting to go back and read it because there are always frustrating moments when I'm trying to finish a piece. There are pieces like “Harmonielehre,” where it ends with a fiery major chord that sends the audience into a frenzy. But such an ending, unless it is ironic, does not fit into our zeitgeist. This ending is inexplicable. Treatment is probably needed to explain what's going on.
Olafsson: I think the only way to end a good conversation is with a question.
ADAMS: That's good. Thank you for your explanation.
Olafsson: My first thought was that he just sent Bach into space. That was my first humorous thought. But on a more serious note, it just raises the question John explained earlier. Where are we at in terms of creating new music and rethinking past material? My answer is that you can certainly write novel fantasy, looking at Bach and Ravel and everything in between, but everyone has to answer for themselves. It's a big question, but that's the question.
