Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in C Minor packs a speedy punch with its rich, complex, repetitive layers. That piece is not unlike the work of the Bay Area’s John Adams, one of the most influential and widely performed living American composers of contemporary classical music.
It’s fitting that in his new piano concerto, After the Fall, written for Icelandic virtuoso Víkingur Ólafsson, Adams has nested a musical Easter egg toward the end in homage to Bach’s Prelude. Those in the audience should be on the lookout for it when Ólafsson, conductor David Robertson, and the San Francisco Symphony give the world premiere of the work at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Jan. 16. (Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is slated to share the program, scheduled to be repeated Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 18 and 19.)
Adams did something similar with Beethoven in his 2012 concerto for string quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest. This time around, “it’s sort of a wry acknowledgement that [Ólafsson] had played 88 performances of Bach while learning my piece,” Adams told SF Classical Voice by phone from his Berkeley home, referring to the pianist’s recent world tour devoted to Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
After the Fall is Adams’s third full-scale piano concerto following Century Rolls (1996), composed for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), written for Yuja Wang.
The new work offers something familiar and different, said Robertson, a frequent Adams collaborator. “There are the classic hallmarks of John’s in terms of how he makes the orchestra sound and how he frames the solo voice of the piano,” the New York City-based conductor, 66, said by phone from Salt Lake City, where he was rehearsing with the Utah Symphony.
“What’s fascinating is it’s like a deck of cards,” Roberston continued, referring to the concerto. “You recognize the suits and the families, but the possibilities of how something might work in any given hand is miraculous in terms of the number of combinations he comes up with.”
It might be tempting to view After the Fall as a musical conversation with another piano concerto the Symphony recently premiered, No Such Spring by Samuel Adams, the composer’s 39-year-old son. But the elder Adams doesn’t see it that way — though the title of his new concerto is a nod to that earlier work in how they both reference the seasons.
“This is hard to say because he’s my son. I really think it’s a masterpiece,” Adams said of No Such Spring. “It took him a long time to find his voice, and it took me a long time to find mine.”
A key inspiration for Adams writing After the Fall was hearing Ólafsson perform Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? a number of times, including in concerts the composer conducted.
“He had the perfect sense of how to play my music,” said Adams. “He has wonderful rhythm and can play with a delicacy and can make enormous sounds without it sounding like a bang.”
One of the benefits of getting older, added the 77-year-old composer, is that one or two generations may now be familiar with his music. That was the case with Ólafsson, who grew up in Iceland with an architect father and a piano teacher mother. His dad introduced him at a young age to much of Adams’s work, while his mom stressed the traditional classical music canon.
“My mom kept throwing Tchaikovsky at me, and my dad kept throwing the musical opposite, like Ligeti,” said Ólafsson by phone from his Reykjavik home, referring to the avant-garde composer György Ligeti.
The musical result, said the 40-year-old pianist, may have helped him find artistic balance.
“There’s always this need to have the new and the old. But I needed the new more in order to feel the spontaneity and freedom [necessary] to play the old masters,” he said.
Ólafsson, unflagging in his admiration of Adams, called him “one of the best composers of the 20th century.”
“Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I play [him],” the pianist went on. “I feel like I’m playing music out of time, timeless music. He’s not speaking to modern times — he’s speaking for all times.”
Adams, unlike Ólafsson, didn't learn the piano as a child. He was a clarinet player, taught by his clarinetist father. “There was no one else to study with” growing up in a remote New Hampshire village, the composer said. “I was pretty good at it,” he added about the clarinet, noting he’d subbed at times for the Boston Symphony Orchestra while in college.
With that background, Adams said he “probably” composes for the piano in a different way because the keyboard wasn’t his primary instrument.
“I couldn’t even accompany my 9-year-old daughter on the piano, but here are these fantastic pianists who play my pieces,” he said with a touch of awe.
Robertson credited Adams’s particular voice to the composer’s “extraordinary consistency [in] juggling” the basic elements of music, including repetition and surprise, while still being able to create “such fantastically diverse subject matter.”
“You can see throughout his life this deep awareness of the main elements that make up what we experience as music,” the conductor said.
In late January, Adams heads south for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series, for which he serves as creative chair. Among the pieces he plans to conduct there are new works by Bay Area natives Dylan Mattingly and Gabriella Smith, both 30-something rising stars in the contemporary classical world.
With his wife Deborah O’Grady, Adams formed the Pacific Harmony Foundation, which commissions works from new generations of composers. Over his long career, Adams has managed to keep his work fresh and new, perhaps by staying connected to both the future and the past.
“When I was a young composer, the criteria then-composers used was what style we were composing in — that of Berlioz, for example,” he said. “Today, [the question is] ’Who is it I’m writing for?’ It’s much healthier.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
