John Adams: UK premiere of piano concerto After the Fall
Leading pianist Víkingur Ólafsson gives the UK premiere of John Adams’s concerto After the Fall, following 17 international performances. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the work with the Philharmonia Orchestra on 25 February at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Completing a round of performances presented by its co-commissioners, John Adams’s piano concerto After the Fall reaches London on 25 February with its soloist Víkingur Ólafsson. Premiered in January 2025 in San Francisco, the work has already travelled widely to Zürich, Hamburg, Paris, Vienna, Gothenburg, Miami and Los Angeles. The performance at the Royal Festival Hall sees Ólafsson joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen.
After the Fall is John Adams’s third full-scale piano concerto, following Century Rolls (1996), written for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), composed for Yuja Wang. The composer had heard Ólafsson performing Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? and when touring together Adams was impressed by the pianist’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for his wider oeuvre. As discussions about the new concerto progressed Adams acknowledged his admiration for Ólafsson’s performances of a wide repertoire including music by Rameau, Bach and Mozart.
The title, After the Fall, is a nod to another piano concerto, No Such Spring, by Adams’s son Samuel Carl Adams, premiered in 2023. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalls. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.”
The double entendre of ‘fall’ – as both the season and the ‘loss of Paradise’ – reminded Adams of Pierre Boulez’s dystopian declaration that “the era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitely over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation. … An ideal or imaginary library provides us with a plethora of models, endless choices and means of exploitation.”
After the Fall, like all of Adams’s music, embraces the very things Boulez pronounced to be symptoms of the Fall: “perpetual return, consolidation, citation”. But, as Thomas May points out, “risks must still be taken – all the more so”. In the culminating section of After the Fall, Adams stages the infiltration of the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, utilizing a similar ‘hall of mirrors’ technique first encountered in his 2012 Beethoven-inspired Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra. The composer wryly notes that, while at work on the piece, Ólafsson was engaged in an international tour comprising 88 performances of the Goldberg Variations: “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess”.
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“…a terrific addition to the composer’s catalog… The sparse texture of the repeated rhythmic figurations does invoke Bach – though only Adams could have written the explosive, more densely orchestrated balance of the first movement.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Stylistically, the work spans the breadth of music history – from the rhythmic pulsations reminiscent of Stravinsky or Bartók ... to the delicate colors of Ravel, blended with a few ‘modern’ experiments.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
After the Fall was co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Paris Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Gothenburg Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, and the Wiener Symphoniker. Plans are underway for the first recording of After the Fall with Víkingur Ólafsson on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
The coming months bring a revival of Opéra de Paris’s production of Nixon in China, with Thomas Hampson and Renée Fleming returning as the Presidential couple (24 Feb). Adams’s most recent stagework Antony and Cleopatra receives its German premiere in Koblenz (9 May) and there is a new staging of The Death of Klinghoffer by Luca Guadagnino – the esteemed film director who has frequently featured Adams’s music in the soundtracks for his movies – opening the Maggio Musicale in Florence (19 Apr).
> Further information on Work: After the Fall
Photos of Adams and Ólafsson by Vern Evans and Ari Magg/DG