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.
