Worlds collide with nature and noir as Adams leads Philharmonic
The Gabriella Smith revolution came to David Geffen Hall Thursday night, as the California-born composer’s Lost Coast for cello and orchestra made its ear-opening New York premiere. John Adams conducted the New York Philharmonic in an evocative program that also included works by Arvo Pärt, Aaron Copland and himself.
Smith, now 32, had already been mentored by Adams in her native Berkeley, attended the Curtis Institute of Music, and collected prestigious composing awards when her Carrot Revolution for string quartet attracted wide attention in 2015. The avid backpacker’s devotion to nature and to protecting the earth from climate change came through clearly in her spoken remarks introducing the piece—then in the elemental sounds of keening strings, shining brass, rattling percussion, and the cries and whispers of soloist Gabriel Cabezas’s amplified cello.
In this full-orchestra version of Lost Coast—the title refers to a particularly isolated section of northern California coastline and, ominously, to the effects of climate change—Smith availed herself of the standard symphony orchestra of double winds and brass plus strings, but also encouraged the percussion players to get creative with traditional instruments and found objects, in order to produce sounds that were “mouth-pop-esque,” “oceanic,” etc. (One hopes the Philharmonic accepted the score’s invitation to borrow “Gabriella’s favorite A-flat metal water bottle from her if she is there,” which she plainly was.)
With the luxury of discreet amplification, cellist Cabezas—the composer’s conservatory classmate and collaborator through the various versions of Lost Coast—could explore novel techniques such as tapping the strings with fingertips or a hard mallet, pianissimo glissandos, and ad-libitum scampering up and down the fingerboard without fear of the orchestra drowning him out. The composer’s focus was not on soloistic display anyway, but on giving the instrument a prominent role in the orchestral texture, which Cabezas played most effectively.
Sounds in nature don’t generally have vibrato, and Cabezas used that familiar string sound only in the work’s most fervent passages. His moans, whooshes and scuttlings found counterparts in the orchestra’s traditional and nontraditional sections, expertly managed by Adams on the podium.
The result was a vivid performance of a highly original piece with something to say—a message in an A-flat bottle, so to speak.
The concert opened not with a noisy overture but with Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a gently sorrowful tribute from one composer who walked a lonely path in the serialism-dominated mid-20th century to another. In a slow-motion cascade of descending string lines, conductor Adams evoked Pärt’s “tintinnabuli” (bell-like) style, accented in this piece by an actual chime, tolling regularly.
The piece’s layered texture produced familiar triadic harmonies enriched by dissonance, in a way Britten would have recognized. It spread a broad canvas for Smith’s bold yet concerned depiction of wild nature.
After intermission, Adams left nature behind and led two quintessentially urban pieces, one set in New York and the other in a peculiar state of mind known as “L.A.”—specifically, the Los Angeles of 1940s Hollywood film noir, as imagined by a true outsider, Bay Area denizen John Adams.
Copland’s nocturnal vignette Quiet City for trumpet, English horn and strings came first. Adams’s fine rendition—slumbering strings tossing in their beds, with smooth highlights from the Philharmonic’s English hornist Ryan Roberts and eloquent, Ivesian “unanswered questions” from principal trumpeter Christopher Martin–was unfortunately undermined by a fundamental mis-staging of the piece.
It’s a good idea for orchestras to feature individual members in performance, but in this case standing Roberts and Martin front-and-center like concerto soloists was the wrong move. Instead of an orchestral tableau with a reedy glow and a lone trumpet somewhere in the distance, the focus was on two players exerting themselves. Try as one may, it’s hard to blend in when a thousand people are staring at you. The piece sounded better with one’s eyes closed, but those two instruments were still too “present” at that location.
One wonders how the dark alleys and rain-slick streets of film noir ever translated to sun-drenched Los Angeles, but Hollywood somehow did it, and its European emigré composers wrote scores to match, often adding jazz inflections for their somewhat disreputable connotations. City Noir was Adams’s 2009 tribute to those days, seen through his own post-minimalist lens.
It wasn’t hard to imagine suspenseful moments, sexy dames, shootouts and car chases as the three movements of Adams’s 35-minute piece unfolded, although he avoided outright parody of the likes of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann in favor of his own ever-changing mix of contemporary orchestral sounds, artfully deploying a vast array of percussion instruments.
Even with Adams’s vigorous conducting and the piece’s constant refreshing of the orchestration, City Noir overstayed its welcome a bit on a program of much shorter but equally evocative pieces. Still, it’s an important item in the Adams oeuvre, the subject fit this well-designed program nicely, and there’s no substitute for hearing the composer’s own lively interpretation.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday. nyphil.org
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