A Serene World Premiere from John Luther Adams at Emerald City Music
It’s rare that a fledgling classical music organization can land a world premiere by a sought-after composer less than a year after it starts presenting. Yet last spring Emerald City Music announced a new co-commission (with five other groups), “there is no one, not even the wind…” by John Luther Adams, would be on the opening program of its second season at the Kakao coffee house in South Lake Union. That eagerly anticipated premiere came to pass Friday night, and was as satisfying to hear as expected.
Adams has consistently used nature and light as the starting points for his work. Much of that has reflected his long sojourn in Alaska, but now he has moved to live in the Sonoran desert and his landscape inspiration is different. For this chamber work, dedicated to flutist Ransom Wilson, he chose flute and alto flute, string quartet (with double bass replacing second violin), piano, and two percussionists using a variety of instruments.
Where his most recent work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” conjures up the power, the depths, the surge and restlessness of the sea, and the constant movement of the waves, this new 25-minute work makes the listener think of a desert landscape midday, serene and quiet, when even birds are hushed, when nothing moves, “not even the wind.” One may think of the desert as dry, but this music is not. Harmonies are warm as the desert is warm.
The music is soft, slow, with the strings providing long-drawn out notes without vibrato, starting from silence and growing. Flutes, also without vibrato, have similar long notes, while the percussionists, on glockenspiel, marimba and vibraphone, lightly release single notes like drops of light into the atmosphere. The piano ties harmonies together unobtrusively. A bass drum provides rumbles of what might be dry thunder, in the far distance, briefly. At the end, the music dies away as it started, to silence.
The whole casts a spell, creating a sense of peace and space almost immediately. The musicians, flutists Wilson and Tara O’Connor, pianist Michael Mizrahi, violinist (and artistic director of the series) Kristin Lee, violist Yura Lee, cellist Dmitri Atapine, bassist Jennifer Godfrey, and percussionists Ayano Kataoka and Svet Stoyanov, keep it all together despite different simultaneous tempos and being placed in specific locations not particularly close to one another. This is another remarkable work from Adams, and leaves keen anticipation of his orchestral work “Become Desert,” to be premiered early next year by the Seattle Symphony.
While this was the seminal work on Emerald City’s first program, a theme for the year will be to honor to Leonard Bernstein’s centennial. The program opened with his ferociously difficult “America!” with a familiar theme from West Side Story, and played with panache by Kristin Lee and Mizrahi. A lively performance of Andrew Norman’s “Light Screens,” which takes inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained art glass windows, sometimes had a faint feel of Irish jigs along with its energetic cross rhythms. Steve Reich’s short and cheerful “Nagoya Marimbas” had the two percussionists deftly negotiating the marvelously intricate, everchanging melodies.
Lastly, Dvořák’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-Flat Major wrapped up the evening with a fine, nuanced performance. Atapine’s lyrical playing of the prominent cello role in the second movement was sheer pleasure, but the whole was an expressive performance full of contrasts, warmth and life. The group played more Bernstein for an encore, another memory from West Side Story.
The enthusiastic sold-out audience bodes well for the rest of this season with its six concerts all of which include fresh and unexpected musical ideas. Next up? The Artist Spotlight program with percussionist and composer Andy Akiho spearheading his own music (plus a smidgen of Arvo Part), October 27.
