If you feel helpless in the face of world events and battered by 24-hour news, you are in good company: America’s greatest living composer, John Adams, feels the same. His latest work, Frenzy, given its world premiere by its dedicatees Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra last week, is Adams’s pulsating reflection on our frenetic times, a leap away from his Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), yet packed with the same excitement and energy. He says: “For me, ‘frenzy’ sums up the feeling, at times overwhelming, of contemplating the modern world around us, especially as it is imagined in our daily doses of digital news and information.”
To achieve the required level of agitation in his 18-minute “short symphony”, he discards minimalism to explore the development of a single motif, one that worries and frets its way into many different guises, sometimes finding relief, but always with a hint of dread running underneath. Celeste, vibraphone, harp and piano send lightning flashes of unease across a sometimes darkly eerie orchestral landscape, and woodwind chatter menacingly until an insistent drum beat drives the strings and brass into a despairing, panicky finish. This could become a theme tune for our age.
