Chicago Symphony Orchestra
This was also a welcome opportunity to hear Adams conduct–until now he’s achieved his notoriety as a composer. He turns out to be not bad: he always had a clear idea of what he wanted and was able to coax the orchestra into delivering it, even when it was obvious, particularly with the Glass piece, that they weren’t all that impressed by what they were playing. He was even better at working the audience. He was passionate about getting the hidebound CSO subscription crowd to share his enthusiasm for wacky music and spent so much time lecturing (with musical illustrations) on what we were going to hear and how we were supposed to take it that I was relieved he didn’t finish up with a pop quiz. His hard work paid off. If some of his selections had been played cold, there probably would have been boos and walkouts, but under his genial, watchful guidance everybody had a fine time. The sight of elderly CSO regulars tapping their feet and laughing to the music of Charles Ives isn’t something I’m soon going to forget.
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He began both programs with Ives. This was inevitable: whatever view you take of American music, Ives looms over the landscape like the Rockies. But Adams approached him rather cautiously; apparently mindful of the audience’s nerves, he was careful to pick out works from the clangorous Ives catalog that wouldn’t trigger a stampede. At the first concert he played the famous and relatively accessible Three Places in New England, at the second, four little collages of traditional American music (the Country Band March, the Ragtime Dance no. 4, At the River, and a hymn setting) that he’d arranged into a kind of suite. This proved to be a clever idea; people seemed to think the suite was a kind of fractured medley and that they were supposed to applaud the tunes they recognized. Adams shrewdly encouraged them by conducting with exuberant high spirits–his accepting, indulgent manner got the message across that this music was funny ha-ha and not funny strange.
So why did Adams steer away from that side of Ives? I don’t think it was just to appease the audience. Adams seems genuinely interested in the unthreatening Ives, the archivist and allusionist of turn-of-the-century American pop, the one who least resembles a King Lear of the New World. This is the Ives that fits his own agenda: one of the most frequent raps against Adams’s work is that it’s a collage of meaningless allusions to other musical forms, to jazz and pop and late Romantic and Renaissance–but how can that be bad if he’s just following the example of the greatest American composer?
The Harrison made for a startling contrast with the ultracool Philip Glass, represented by a bit from that famous exercise in minimalist Muzak “Glassworks.” Facades is a lightweight composition even by Glass’s standards: a couple of mock-melancholy saxophone lines laid over a repetitive ground of strings. It plays like the sound track for some deadpan techno-noir thriller, and serves mainly to illustrate how adept Glass is at contriving music that sounds traditional and yet has no expressive content. I will concede that it’s challenging to play, at least judging by how many blown notes and miscues there were in the CSO’s performance–they were clearly having a hard time being as robotic as the piece required. I can’t imagine why Adams thought it was worth the trouble; it has already been perfectly encased in a technically immaculate recording, and a live performance adds nothing.
It was disappointing that both concerts ended so limply (and I should say that Adams has written better music, including his recent orchestral pieces El Dorado and Century Rolls). Nevertheless, I came away thinking that Adams does deserve to be a major figure in contemporary music. He may not be a great composer, but he’s a great showman–and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment. One of the reasons classical music lost so much of its audience over the last several decades is that composers kept churning out works of hieratic solemnity that were played only to hushed circles of initiates. They forgot that the best art has what Wallace Stevens once called “an essential gaudiness.” Adams has a glutton’s taste for that gaudiness, and his programs were consistently surprising in a way classical concerts rarely are. It would be a grand and admirable thing if he could make a career out of taking avant-garde pieces that are dismissed as difficult or dull and making them accessible and entertaining. Postmodern music could sorely use a P.T. Barnum–somebody who could revive the venerable American traditions of dazzlement and flabbergastery.
