Adams's "knock out" City Noir on Tour and on iTunes
(May 2010)
Adams's "knock out" City Noir on Tour and on iTunesJohn Adams’s “knock out” City Noir, which opened Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural season as the new Music Director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has enjoyed an extraordinary welcome in its first year.
In addition to being recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon through iTunes, the piece returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic program November 27-29 as part of the West Coast, Left Coast festival in Los Angeles, Adams himself conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the UK and French premieres in March, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic took it on Dudamel’s first tour this month, reaching San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, Philadelphia, and ending in New York City.
Allan Kozinn of The New York Times reports:
“Mr. Adams’s 'City Noir' is meant to be a portrait of Los Angeles, seen through the prism of its own cinematic mythology: that is, as a fountainhead of mythmaking and storytelling. The music has the dark aura of a 1950s detective film (or a contemporary remake of one), with ensemble writing so texturally dense and chromatic that even if you had kept close tabs on Mr. Adams’s music over the last 35 years, you would hardly recognize this as his work.
“Elements that he has long acknowledged as influences — Ivesian harmonies for example — are plentiful, and the work’s three colorfully etched movements are tinged with jazzy percussion figures and solo saxophone, trombone and trumpet lines in which the melodic accents of jazz mingle with mid-20th-century angularity. The work’s finale, 'Boulevard Night,' includes a solo trumpet, set against melancholy string chords, that evokes Copland’s 'Quiet City' (though in his program notes, Mr. Adams writes that he intended to suggest the score from “Chinatown”).
“If you still think of Mr. Adams as a Minimalist, you will have to wait 12 minutes for any evidence of that style, and when it comes — a brisk, repeating figure in the woodwinds — it lasts less than a minute. A later instance, in the work’s final pages, is hidden within a thick texture and a welter of cross-rhythms.”
Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times writes:
“The first movement, titled The City and Its Double, is a swirling panoply of scurrying strings and winds, ominous brass chords, syncopated jazz drumming, along with, typically in Adams, syncopated everything. Melodies appear as inexplicably as a dirty blond in Philip Marlowe’s office. The second movement is softer and, on the surface, sweeter than the first, and jazzy… The third movement, Boulevard Night, begins with a CinemaScope sunrise, which is followed by a dazzling trumpet solo. Stravinsky pops up here as well in a knockout finale.”
Richard Morrison of The London Times adds:
“To call John Adams’s City Noir a film score minus the film does slanderous injustice to its volcanic force, multilayered textures, hair-raising climaxes and symphonic arguments. No Hollywood director would allow a movie to be upstaged by such a turbulent, titanic score.
“Yet City Noir, given a brilliant European premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction, is infused with the seething energies, menace and melodrama of one particular cinematic genre — the film noir. The restlessness, the sardonic relish of urban angst familiar from the hard-bitten tales of Hammett and Chandler seeps through it like a dark stain. But that is balanced by an overwhelming feeling of exhilaration at the dense, random and never-ending tangle of narratives in the modern metropolis. …
“Just as compelling is its sweeping homage to urban American music. Adams is intensely (but not blindly) patriotic, and acutely conscious of his own antecedents. Though City Noir is a far more complex work than, say, Rhapsody in Blue, it pays homage to Gershwin’s eclecticism with fabulously free-wheeling jazzy solos for saxophone, trombone and trumpet. But it also evokes the swirling cityscapes of Ives, Varèse and Bernstein, as well as the exhilarating drive of Adams’s own early minimalist scores. A vast orchestra is deployed with masterly assurance. And there’s even room in this whirling vortex for yearning string melodies and moments of eerie calm and beauty.”
John Adams continues as Creative Chair throughout the next Los Angeles Philharmonic seasons, serving as Festival Director for West Coast, Left Coast (a three-week multi-disciplinary festival in celebration of California’s distinct musical culture), and overseeing the Green Umbrella series.
Looking ahead, City Noir receives its Canadian premiere March 5, 2011 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Peter Oundjian.
Photo credit: Margaretta Mitchell
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