In 2016 the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra introduced to the UK one of the finest orchestral scores of the 21st century to date, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. Ludovic Morlot, who had commissioned the work for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted the Birmingham premiere too, and he was again on the podium for the first performance here of the new piece the CBSO co-commissioned, Vespers of the Blessed Earth.
Adams’ music has regularly celebrated the wonders and beauties of the natural world, whether in Alaska, where he used to live, or in the deserts of Mexico, where he now spends much of his time. But the tone of the five pieces, three of them choral, that make up these Vespers is distinctly elegiac. “I wanted to give full voice to the grief so many of us feel today,” he says, “to seek a measure of consolation and solace, and some hope in the enduring beauty of the Earth.”
