Like any great composer, John Adams tailors his concertos to the artistic personalities and musical strengths of the performers he’s working with. He composed his first full-scale piano concerto, Century Rolls, a charming extended riff on early 20th-century American musical styles, in 1997 for the genial Emanuel Ax. His second piano concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? written some 20 years later, embodies Yuja Wang’s extroverted flamboyance.
Luckily, we didn’t have to wait nearly as long for Adams’s third piano concerto, After the Fall. The San Francisco Symphony gave the world premiere of the work on Thursday, Jan. 16, at Davies Symphony Hall under the baton of guest conductor David Robertson.
The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, for whom the piece was written, has had great success performing Must the Devil (including in 2022 concerts with the Symphony). But he also spent the 2023–2024 season away from new music, playing only J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. After the Fall, which unfolds over about half an hour in three connected movements, is more introverted and austere than Must the Devil and consciously makes connections across the centuries between Adams and Bach.
The new concerto’s dreamy opening conjures up thoughts of other composers, however. Against hushed, sustained strings, the piano rises in counterpoint with a celesta and a pair of harps, recalling the beautiful transparency of Maurice Ravel’s orchestration and the moodiness of Béla Bartók’s night music. The sparse texture of the repeated rhythmic figurations does invoke Bach — though only Adams could have written the explosive, more densely orchestrated balance of the first movement.
The reflective slow movement begins with a broad descending theme, heard in strings and piano, that progresses to a contrasting rising theme. Here, Adams plays with the listener’s inner metronome, setting the ear off balance by alternating regular and irregular time signatures — making each phrase appear to start, or end, too soon. Over the course of the movement, the number of notes in each beat seems to increase, accelerating toward the fast final movement, which brings back some of the opening rhythmic material.
Because Adams wrote After the Fall while Olafsson was in the midst of touring the Goldbergs, “something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess,” said the composer, as related in Thomas May's program note. “Leak” is quite the understatement; as the third movement progresses, Adams closely alludes, again and again, to the C-minor Prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. It is rather too much. Adams is more interesting when he’s subtle in his allusions to other composers.
He also undermines listener expectations in the finale by building the musical tension to the point where you might find a spectacular cadenza, only to back off and leave just a few instruments to quietly end the concerto. It’s quite an abrupt close and feels as though the composer could have dissipated the accumulated energy better with a longer coda.
Still, After the Fall is a terrific addition to the composer’s catalog, a piece that will likely be performed and pondered for decades. Ólafsson, a shy and gawky stage presence, played with masterly grace and precision, and Robertson, a famed conductor of new music, brought out all the beauty and mystery of the score.
The concert opened with a beautifully sustained account of Charles Ives’s mysterious The Unanswered Question for strings, four flutes, and offstage trumpet, a superb choice to precede After the Fall. The hushed, hymnlike writing for the strings sounded like a celestial choir in Davies, distant and yet present, while the flutes interjected skittering, dissonant phrases. Over it all, principal trumpet Mark Inouye played long and mysterious melodies, as if from another land.
The second half of the program consisted of Carl Orff’s crowd-pleasing cantata Carmina Burana, which many love and others, including myself, do not. Composed after Hitler took power in Germany but before the start of World War II, Carmina has a noisy triumphalism that can evoke pictures of the Nuremberg rallies and more. When you know what would follow in just a few years, it’s hard to find humor in Orff’s comic episode of the roasting swan, for example.
Perhaps another, more complex piece could have been paired with Adams’s new concerto. Music by Bartók or Igor Stravinsky would have worked well, yet here was another performance of Carmina, which the Symphony Chorus sang as recently as 2022 and 2024.
Nonetheless, even a skeptic must admit that this performance was close to ideal, between the brilliance of the orchestra and Robertson’s dramatic shaping of the hourlong score. Carmina is the Steven Spielberg of choral works: You know you’re being manipulated, and you respond anyway. The Symphony Chorus and San Francisco Girls Chorus were typically nimble in both the brash and delicate sections of the work, though the former group’s pitch uncharacteristically sagged at the ends of some phrases.
Will Liverman, making his Symphony debut, delivered his solos in a warm and expressive baritone. Susanna Phillips soared brilliantly through the soprano solos. Tenor Arnold Livingston Geis sang and acted the swan as amusingly as is possible.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
