John Adams

John Adams’ music has long since captured the admiration of listeners for its inimitable American qualities. City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with Adams calling it ‘an imaginary film score’ in its evocation of a terse, melodramatic and menace-drenched sound world. Fearful Symmetries exemplifies Adams’ steamroller motor rhythms, endlessly inventive in their shifts of timbre, texture and color. The album ends with a work dedicated to Marin Alsop, a capricious “Spider Dance” of memorable rhythmic drive.

John Adams’ music has long since captured the admiration of listeners for its inimitable American qualities. City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with Adams calling it ‘an imaginary film score’ in its evocation of a terse, melodramatic and menace-drenched sound world. Fearful Symmetries exemplifies Adams’ steamroller motor rhythms, endlessly inventive in their shifts of timbre, texture and color. The album ends with a work dedicated to Marin Alsop, a capricious “Spider Dance” of memorable rhythmic drive.

John Adams - Fellow Traveler: The Complete String Quartet Works of John Adams - Attacca Quartet (2013) {Azica ACD-71280}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 337 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 163 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 178 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Azica Records | ACD-71280
Classical / Modern Classical / Chamber Music / Post Minimalism

When it comes to composers broadly categorized under the heading of minimalism, it's rare to find works grouped by genre in the conventional way. But the Attacca Quartet, a young group out of New York's Juilliard School, shows what can be done with this set of three pieces by John Adams, entirely different in tone but clearly the products of the same composer. The best-known work on the program, John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994), has been recorded several times.

In terms of the scale of his compositions, John Adams' career is somewhat anomalous for a contemporary composer. While the usual pattern tends to be for a composer to begin a career writing smaller pieces (which have a far likelier chance of being performed) and then expanding to larger forms as his or her reputation grows, Adams (with very few exceptions) was writing large-scale operas and orchestral and choral works starting in the early '80s and didn't begin devoting himself to chamber music with any regularity until the mid-'90s.

Chamber music has never been John Adams' most natural outlet for expression; he tends to work on a large scale, in both duration and the performing forces his music calls for. Violinist Angèle Dubeau, who had already released "portrait" albums featuring the string works of Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, therefore didn't have a large range of choices of Adams works to fill out this CD, but the three pieces included are all winners. Shaker Loops (1978) for string septet was Adams' first big success and it remains one of his most frequently performed works, probably at least in part because of the relatively modest size of ensemble it requires.

The Met's production, staged by Adams' long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, stars James Maddalena as Richard Nixon, a role he created at the opera's world premiere in 1987 and has since performed at international leading opera houses, including the English National Opera, Netherlands Opera, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Nixon in China was recorded and broadcast live in movie theatres around the world as part of The Met: Live in HD on February 12, 2011 - 10 days after the opera received its Met premiere.

Symphony No. 10 is the tenth symphony by the American composer Philip Glass. The work was commissioned by the Orchestre Français des Jeunes and premiered August 9, 2012, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Orchestre Français des Jeunes at the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence, France.[1] The piece had its United Kingdom premiere July 31, 2013 at The Proms in Royal Albert Hall.

Composer John Adams' album Road Movies contains five pieces that Adams' considers "travel music, (…) passing through harmonic and textural regions as one would pass through on a car trip." Indeed, during Leila Josefowicz's spirited and appropriately brusque reading of the "40% Swing" movement from the title work, one hears what sounds like a passing auto in the left channel. Is it mere coincidence or the album concept channeling onto the master tape?

Leave it to Christoph Eschenbach and the Houston Symphony to deliver one of the more impressive classical discs of 1999: a pairing of the violin concertos of John Adams and Philip Glass. Hearing the works of these two American music mavericks side-by-side is a study in contrasts: Adams's postmodernist composition from 1993 is filled with spooky overtones, as the violin threads its way through the piece, always at the forefront.

John Adams’ music has long since captured the admiration of listeners for its inimitable American qualities. City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with Adams calling it ‘an imaginary film score’ in its evocation of a terse, melodramatic and menace-drenched sound world. Fearful Symmetries exemplifies Adams’ steamroller motor rhythms, endlessly inventive in their shifts of timbre, texture and color. The album ends with a work dedicated to Marin Alsop, a capricious “Spider Dance” of memorable rhythmic drive.