John Adams: new String Quartet and City Noir

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John Adams: new String Quartet and City Noir

(June 2009)

The St Lawrence String Quartet gave the premiere of John Adams’s new String Quartet in January as part of the Juilliard FOCUS! Festival in New York.

The new String Quartet is John Adams’s first full work for the classic genre, though it does follow John’s Book of Alleged Dances, combining quartet with electronics. Commissioned by The Juilliard School, Stanford Lively Arts and The Banff Centre for the St Lawrence Quartet, the 30-minute work is being toured extensively in North America. It crossed the Atlantic to Switzerland and Germany in March and further European performances are in March 2010 at Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Barbican in London.

Nonesuch will record the String Quartet this autumn.

“Like a perpetuum mobile, motion sweeps through the parts: it hums and purrs on the stage. The Canadians play the work as a scherzo with few points of repose. Electrified, like music which is in a constant current. The lively, rhythmically-charged, wild style of playing suits the 20-year-old ensemble, for which Adams has written the perfect work.” Ruhr Nachrichten

“A stunner…the piece boasts all the attributes audiences have come to associate with Adams’ best music… Its controlled restlessness yields to tremendous fervency, from the ‘ghostly’ elements of the first part to the second, with its ascending lines that rise and shimmer like heat off a highway…Adams at his most gripping, and the St. Lawrence players gave the work a fierce, go-for-broke reading.” Mercury News

City Noir launches new era at Los Angeles Philharmonic
Next season brings first performances of Adams’s new orchestral work, City Noir. The work was commissioned to inaugurate Gustavo Dudamel’s era as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on 8 October, as well as Adams’s appointment as Creative Chair of the orchestra for the next three years. First European performances are by the London Symphony Orchestra under Adams at Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Barbican in London next March, alongside the new String Quartet. The Dutch premiere in the ZaterdagMatinee series at the Concertgebouw follows in November 2010.

John Adams writes: “City Noir was inspired by a reading of the Black Dahlia chapter in Kevin Starr’s Embattled Dreams, a book that traces the history of Los Angeles ‘noir’ culture during the 1940s and 1950s. The ‘feeling tone’ of the newspaper articles, pulp fiction, movies and film music of the era suggested a symphonic work that might view the strange sensibility of ‘noir’ through the refracted lens of modern orchestral sound and structure.”

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