Seattle Symphony Gives Premiere of ‘Become Desert’ from John Luther Adams

Cover image: Composer John Luther Adams with Seattle Symphony, led by Ludovic Morlot (Photo: Brandon Patoc)

For a classical composer, the live realization and first performance of a piece which may have taken months (years?) to complete is likely one fraught with a combination of anxiety and excitement. For John Luther Adams, who was present at the premiere of his large work Become Desert, Thursday night with Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall, it could have been even more fraught.

For one, he surely could not have heard how the result could sound even though he must have been able to imagine it, given that the palette is so large, the forces so dispersed, and whether the musicians could encompass it as he wanted. For another, his last piece of this type, Become Ocean which won a Pulitzer Prize and many accolades in 2014, is a hard act to follow. That too was premiered at Benaroya.

Be that as it may, Become Desert turned out to be as effective, as unusual and as beautiful a work as its predecessor, and huge kudos go to music director Ludovic Morlot, the members of the orchestra and the women of the Seattle Symphony Chorale, for taking this vast work with its disparate parts and making it all work so seamlessly.

The piece was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony with the support of Dale and Leslie Chihuly (Leslie is just stepping down from nine years as chairman of the Symphony board), and Adams has mentioned that he had the configurations and acoustics of Benaroya in mind when he composed Become Desert.

He wanted the musicians divided around the entire space; thus, the strings were spread across the front of the stage with four harps dotted among them and two sets of percussion and timpani at either side. At the back of the stage on risers was another grouping, the winds and crotales—tiny cymbal-like discs in different pitches. On the first balcony halfway back at one side were trumpets, trombones and bell chimes, on the other the horns and chimes, while at the very back in the top balcony were the women of the Chorale with hand bells.

The 40-minute work unfolds with extreme slowness, from almost inaudible sound at the start to loud in the middle, back to dying away to nothing at the end. Adams commented that the work is about light, the light in the desert, so perhaps this mirrors the dawning and setting of a day, though nothing is definite about this work. It has no structure, as is usually meant for a piece of music. Each instrument played very long, slow notes, largely soft, requiring enormous control of breath for the winds and brass, and of their bows for the string players, whose arms must have been aching with the effort by the end of the work. They played without vibrato and often using harmonics, the very high clear tone achieved by touching a string very lightly while bowing.

The effect of the work was one of layers and yes, it felt like layers of light surrounding one as gradually more instruments joined in with their different timbres including the voices intoning just one sound, ”Luz” (“light”). Changes occurred infinitesimally and cumulatively, as they would in nature, while assorted soft tings, pings, plinks, bongs, and other tiny noises were dropped in seemingly at random. Only in the middle of the work when it was coming towards forte, did the timpani start drum rolls rising and falling, from a gentle rise and drop gradually to louder ones, then back to soft ones, alternating between the players on either side of the stage.

Adams had commented that it should be listened to ruminatively, an excellent directive. The whole left a sense of contemplative peacefulness which lasted long after the end of the work, which received enthusiastic applause from the large audience, some of whom may have dozed off in this gentle atmosphere.

Become Desert took up the second half of the concert, the first being Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, No. 5, his last and most ambitious. Pianist Jeremy Denk was the soloist in a performance with the orchestra which was very much one of the 20th to 21st century rather than late classical. Denk played with nuance and wide dynamics, with the second slow movement particularly lovely. Both orchestra and Denk were on the forceful side in both first and last movements’ louder sections giving the work a lot of heft, but they also maintained its dignity. Denk was brought back for an encore, Mozart’s Andante from Piano Sonata K. 545, played with delicacy and shape.