Adams, a Romantic pianist, Munch, and a master mezzo

CD & DVD Reviews

August 07, 2011

JOHN ADAMS: “SON OF CHAMBER SYMPHONY’’ AND STRING QUARTET

International Contemporary Ensemble, St. Lawrence String Quartet

Nonesuch

All modern works called “Chamber Symphony’’ must somehow reckon with the influence of Arnold Schoenberg’s domineering example. John Adams does so with his characteristic California aplomb, taking the inspiration he needed from Schoenberg’s virtuosic writing and leaving most of the rest behind alongside all of his other East Coast musical baggage.

Adams’s second chamber symphony - his first came in 1992, and he calls this more recent piece “Son of Chamber Symphony’’ - has a madcap wit, an infectious rhythmic energy and vitality, and a beautifully wrought slow movement, all of it given an expert reading by the International Contemporary Ensemble under the composer’s direction. The work is paired on this Nonesuch disc with his String Quartet, written in 2008 for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, who perform it here with absolute authority and conviction.

In the quartet, Adams again makes a daunting historical form his own. He writes of approaching this keystone genre of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Bartok with a sense of awe, but that certainly doesn’t translate into tentativeness or circumspection. Instead we get visceral, dark-hued, and fiercely expressive music marked by some of his older characteristic gestures - minimalist memories, if you will - compressed with a kind of febrile Romantic intensity. The St. Lawrence owns the piece for now, but with all the adventurous young ensembles out there hungry for rugged yet accessible fare, this work is clearly destined to take on a life of its own.

JEREMY EICHLER

MOZART: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 20, 23, 24, AND 25

Ivan Moravec; Sir Neville Marriner; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Piano Classics

Ivan Moravec made his first big splash in the United States through, of all things, a late-1960s Book-of-the-Month Club offering of the Chopin Préludes, Ballades, and Nocturnes. His limited touring and recording schedule may have kept him from achieving the fame of a Maurizio Pollini or an Alfred Brendel, but his weighted tone and dramatic approach are what you want in Romantic repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Debussy, and he turns out to be the man for late Mozart as well.