John Adams’ colossal three-movement Harmonielehre was written in the mid-1980s after a fallow period. The role of the unconscious in freeing up the creative process was crucial, and it may have been his immersion in Carl Jung’s writings that allowed Adams to take his own dream of a supertanker launching into the air from the surface of the San Francisco’ Bay as though from Cape Canaveral as the trigger for a symphony in which minimalism meets late-flowering Romanticism.
For the listener, it constitutes a wholly immersive aural experience and, in this performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under its principal conductor Ryan Bancroft, the impact of its tsunamis of sound, notably in the final surge, was almost overwhelming. Bancroft has already proved a persuasive advocate of the music of his fellow Americans and his control of the extremes of colour and texture was impressive. But Adams’ work is also a primal assertion of tonality and it was in the central movement, The Anfortas Wound, that the connection with Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise, Harmonieliehre, felt particularly resonant (Adams’ own writing on his thinking around all this is required reading). The emergence of the solo trumpet’s high aching line is the movement’s most obviously arresting feature, but Adams invests such care and expressivity in every facet as to make his allusions to composers of the past, Sibelius and Mahler, entirely logical, and moving.
In retrospect, the groundbreaking nature of Charles Ives’s Two Contemplations, composed in 1906 and 1908, which opened this concert, seemed all the more extraordinary. The Unanswered Question, as well as its elements of existential investigation, had with the repeated utterances of a single trumpet – Philippe Schartz’s position high at the back of St David’s Hall adding a dramatic spatial dimension – and the responses from a quartet of flutes offered a pre-echo of Adams’s instrumentation and an integrity to the whole programme.
All was eloquently realised by BBCNOW musicians, as too was their playing in Szymanowksi’s often glittering and sumptuous First Violin Concerto, which – given the evening’s title The American Dream – felt oddly sandwiched between Ives and Adams. South Korean Bomsori Kim was the impassioned soloist.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 26 April and then on BBC Sounds for 30 days.
