Adams: City Noir heads features in London and Paris
(February 2010)
John Adams: City Noir heads features in London and ParisJohn Adams is featured in Paris and London this spring, with first European performances of City Noir, his new orchestral celebration of Los Angeles.
John Adams’s new orchestral score, City Noir, is heard for the first time in Europe this spring with performances by the London Symphony Orchestra. The composer conducts the work as part of an Adams Focus at the Barbican Centre in London (February-March) and within the first Parisian festival devoted to his music, presented by Cité de la Musique (20-27 March). City Noir can also be experienced on a recently released DVD of Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural concert at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon 0440 073 4531 3), which launched Adams’s relationship with the orchestra as Creative Chair.
City Noir follows El Dorado and The Dharma at Big Sur, as the third panel in a triptych of Adams works celebrating what the composer describes as “the California experience, its landscape and its culture”. Los Angeles is the city of movies, and the new work conjures up the late 1940s and ’50s and “the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us”, summed up for the composer in Kevin Starr’s book Embattled Dreams. Adams also relates how he was “stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes back as far as the early 1920s.”
“Making a telling artistic statement, Mr. Dudamel began his tenure conducting the premiere of the new Adams piece, City Noir, a bustling, complex 35-minute work in three movements. It is not easy to evoke the milieu of an era in music. But this score was also inspired by jazz-inflected American symphonic music of the 1920s through the ’50s, from Gershwin to Copland to Bernstein, something that is a lot easier to evoke. Mr. Adams does so brilliantly in this searching, experimental de facto symphony… He has become a master at piling up materials in thick yet lucid layers. Moment to moment the music is riveting.”
New York Times
“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.”
Los Angeles Times
“…a jazzy, gritty, sultry, and wonderfully inventive 35-minute symphony…”
Boston Globe
City Noir is toured by Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York in May. The work receives its Dutch premiere by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer in the ZaterdagMatinee series on 20 November, and a Toronto Symphony performance is planned in a future season.
John Adams: French & UK premieres
City Noir
11 March, Barbican, London
16 March, Salle Pleyel, Paris
London Symphony Orchestra/Adams
A Flowering Tree
20 March, Cité de la Musique, Paris
Gulbenkian Orchestra/Joana Carneiro
String Quartet
23 March, Cité de la Musique, Paris
25 March, St Luke’s, Barbican, London
St Lawrence String Quartet
Son of Chamber Symphony
27 March, Cité de la Musique, Paris
AskoSchoenberg Ensemble/Adams
> Barbican Adams Focus
> Cité de la Musique Adams feature
> Further information on Work: City Noir
Photo: Margaretta Mitchell
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