Adams’ 20th Century Rolls--and Rocks

John Adams’ significance in the 21st century can hardly be known at this early date. But what he means to us here and now proved interesting to think about Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Bay Area composer was on hand to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two of his works.

“Century Rolls” (a piano concerto) and “The Nixon Tapes” (excerpts from the opera “Nixon in China”) take fond, almost nostalgic looks back at specific moments or aspects of the 20th century that are embedded in our daily lives. That’s a big task for music, but a doable one. And for anyone searching for what differentiates new classical music from the popular culture, this is a good place to begin. Pop music’s immediacy speaks in a common tongue to and about the moment. New classical music has a larger view of the past and a fancier language. But when it works as well as Adams’ music does, its freshness feels permanent.

The inspiration for “Century Rolls,” Adams told the audience before the performance (the second of three over the weekend), was his love for three jazz-flavored piano concertos, by Gershwin, Ravel and Copland, from the 1920s. Like Ravel’s, his concerto has a soft, meltingly lyrical center. Like all three, it has a clanking, swinging final movement, which Adams titles “Hail Bop,” having, at one time, amusingly mistaken the comet’s name. But what takes this engaging half-hour concerto out of the past is its celebration of the machine in music.

The sound we know of the Jazz Age is mechanical reproduction, either the phonograph, or in the case of what interested Adams, the player piano, with its bright metallic clatter. Later in the century, the player piano became the focus of a renegade American-born composer working in Mexico City. Punching his own piano rolls, Conlon Nancarrow discovered exciting new ways of complicating rhythm that has had a profound effect on composers, Adams among them.

Also at the time of the those jazz concertos Adams admires, it seemed that Modernists everywhere were infected by what literary critic Hugh Kenner called “the mechanic muse.” Today, the heartbeat of much popular music is, of course, the rhythm machine. Minimalism, one of the dominant styles in late 20th century music, was once described as broken-record music.

“Century Rolls” puts a very human face on all this mechanization. It was written for a warm, substantive pianist, Emanuel Ax. And although he is most at home in the 19th century--Ax is one of our most outstanding Chopin pianists--he has an impish sense of adventure. In “Century Rolls,” Adams can be merciless, forcing Ax into mechanical rhythmic grooves, but the machine is full of delightful kinks that send it off into unpredictable, and often surprisingly effusive, directions.

The long first movement reminds me of an elaborate Buster Keaton chase scene--you never know what Ax is going to run into next. The slow movement, “Manny’s Gym,” is a fanciful takeoff on Satie’s “Gymnopedies.” “Hail Bop” is a riot of catchy rhythms, complex enough to sound almost inscrutable, thrilling enough to bring roars of approval from a large and enthusiastic crowd. Ax performs the concerto often and is a consummate virtuoso. He still seems a little worried about some of the mechanical passages, but that only adds to the attractiveness and humanity of his playing.

“Nixon in China” celebrates a moment in history less for its political implications than for its cultural and profoundly human ones. It examines the clash of East and West, but it does so by looking deeply into the characters who held radically opposing views that still divide our world today. The marvelous portraits in “Nixon in China” are of leaders who, when faced with a culture they didn’t understand, were forced to examine their own insecurities. No documentary can show you what it might have felt like to be Dick or Pat or Mao at that time, but through Adams’ music and Alice Goodman’s words the cultural struggle becomes personalized and newly comprehensible.

A couple of years ago, Adams assembled three different sets of excerpts from the opera under the general title “The Nixon Tapes” in hopes of generating a new interest in the 1987 opera, which, having lost its novelty, had been languishing. The parts he chose for the L.A. Philharmonic performance included the opening scene of the opera, in which Nixon steps off Air Force One and sings with that special Nixonian blend of glee and paranoia about being on the news and part of history. The suite concluded with the first Chinese banquet and toasts by Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and Nixon. The middle section was Pat Nixon’s touching aria from the second act.

The performance was a suggestion, but only that, of what this important opera has to offer. James Maddalena, who created the title role, has unnervingly absorbed Nixon’s physical mannerisms. Susan Narucki made a bright and sympathetic Pat. William Sharp, however, was less successful at capturing Chou’s wise nobility. John Ames took the small role of Kissinger. Adams subtly amplifies solo singers and the chorus (the confident Los Angeles Master Chorale), but the balances between singers and orchestra were never convincing (an opera company has more time and resources to work out those mechanical problems).

Nor is Adams the most convincing conductor of his music. He is capable on the podium and a winning presence. He knows exactly what he wants, and he is careful and precise with difficult rhythms. He clearly seems to enjoy performing, and he seems to have an easy relationship with the orchestra and audience. Everybody likes him.

But as performances of his music by Kent Nagano, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas have demonstrated, there can be more nuance, more punch, more expression to his music than he brings out. Still, the personal relationship that the orchestra and audience have forged with Adams has a value that goes beyond specific performances: It helps get the music in our collective bloodstreams, where it belongs.