Anything but Minimalist

The news of the past few days has not been encouraging for an American in London. Headlines have been dominated by British alarm over the American treatment of prisoners of war in Cuba. Rude editorial cartoons lambaste President Bush mercilessly. In a book published here this week, the archbishop of Wales, Rowan Williams, the likely next archbishop of Canterbury, labels the war in Afghanistan as responding to terrorism with terrorism.

Yet in the newspapers, on the radio and television, and in the concert halls of the Barbican Centre, an American composer and his Americanness have been cause not just for celebration but outright jubilation.

Every January, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Barbican jointly sponsor a “Composer Weekend,” a three-day immersion in the works of a single composer of the 20th and now 21st century. Berg, Janacek, Weill, Hindemith, Berio, Birtwistle, Boulez, Lutoslawski, Ives, Tavener and Schnittke have been among those investigated since the series began with Stockhausen in 1985.

This year, the composer was John Adams.

From Friday to Sunday, “John’s Earbox,” as the weekend was called, included eight all-Adams concerts, along with films and talks. It began with a concert performance of the opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” and ended with a new orchestral piece, “Guide to Strange Places.”

Weekend passes to the entire festival were snapped up in October immediately after they went on sale. Nearly every event was sold out, and some had long lines for cancellations. More than 20 works by Adams were performed, with the 54-year-old, Bay Area-based composer in residence throughout. The programs were broadcast by the BBC on the radio, along with a week of preparatory programming. The final concert was televised. The cheering, ecstatic crowds at the concerts were highly unusual by the normally restrained standards here.

Equally exceptional was the makeup of the audiences: sophisticated classical music lovers, curious newcomers, teenagers wearing Radiohead T-shirts, families who might just as well have taken a Sunday stroll over to the popular Tate Modern.

And it wasn’t only the audiences who welcomed Adams. In one of the many advance articles about the composer, Andrew Clark in the Financial Times wondered whether Adams might not be the greatest American composer of all, and certainly more all-around than George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Elliott Carter or Brian Wilson. Meanwhile, the early reviews ranged from generally positive to wildly so.

In the Guardian, Andrew Clements called Adams’ 1985 orchestral work, “Harmonielehre,” “the definite postmodern masterpiece” and “one of the landmarks in music of the second half of the 20th century.” Even a simple radio listing in the London Times described Adams as “the composer most likely to bring together the disparate armies of classical music fans and pop lovers.”

Indeed, the idea that Adams offers something for everyone seemed to be exactly what British cultural life desperately seeks at the moment. The most celebrated British composers either take the Modernist high road (Harrison Birtwistle) or are unapologetically populist (Michael Nyman) with divided, partisan and, in the case of the Modernists, not terribly large audiences.

There is also, in the post-Sept.11 present, a strong reaction against fashionable new British art, especially the in-vogue young British visual artists such as Damien Hirst. In a magazine article last week, for instance, Ivan Massow, the chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, railed against the shoddiness of the latest Conceptual art as “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat.”

Adams was presented as the perfect tonic. In pre-concert talks, in the press, in conversations with Barbican concert-goers, one heard continual praise for Adams’ bringing substance to a Postmodern mixing of styles. His thoughtful, considerate and often amusing manner in interviews further charmed and impressed. Many called him the new Copland and sought the clue to his success in his relationship to the American experience.

A little controversy didn’t hurt, either. The concert performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” the first British performance of the complete work, inevitably attracted attention in the wake of the recent cancellation of excerpts from the opera by the Boston Symphony. But the attitude expressed by representatives of the BBC Symphony--which performed it under its new chief conductor, American Leonard Slatkin--was that the opera offered a serious examination of the roots of terrorism and was exactly what the times called for.

In the pre-concert talk with the composer, the librettist, Alice Goodman, explained that for her the confrontation between Palestinian hijackers and the American Jewish tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro was practically an Old Testament story, with “people still killing each other over land and belief in the Negev.”

Performed by an intense cast in a darkened auditorium, with a sober attention to music and text (projected as surtitles), the mood was one of somber and unflinching reflection on the terrible murder of an innocent victim. If anything, the newspaper critics seemed slightly disappointed that the opera was not rabble-rousing after all; they complained about too much slow music. A shaken audience in the hall, however, weighed in with thunderous applause (as, according to reports, did an audience in Ferrara, Italy, where the opera was, coincidentally, given a staging Sunday by an all-Italian cast).

*

At the other end of the weekend, Adams’ “Guide to Strange Places,” which the composer conducted, startled with the immediacy of its reflection of how the world has changed since Sept. 11. Completed in September, just before the terrorist attacks, and premiered in October in Amsterdam, it begins as an almost self-referential parody of Adams in his Minimalist, chugging mode.

The composer explained to the audience that, wanting to write a lighthearted “fantastique” movement, he started with what he knew and let himself go. But where he went was into dark, ominous, weird realms that his music has never before entered. What begins as bright, chirping birdsong ends with frightening bass drum thuds and unresolved growls in the brass. To me, it sounded as if Adams had presciently found the strange places we all discover after our complacency is shattered.

A wealth of music in between covered familiar Adams ground. Some of the extremes were missing, which meant that the festival lacked full context. There were none of the early experimental pieces, the electronic pieces, the pop songs.

Missing too were the recent masterworks (“Naive and Sentimental Music” and “El Nino”). Still, the overview was extensive, and the overall impression was of a composer ever ready to bring the world and how he feels about it into the concert hall.

Performances were mostly good, occasionally striking, once or twice revelatory. Slatkin led an orchestral concert in addition to “Klinghoffer,” which included a more monumental than probing account of “Harmonielehre.”

Leila Josefowicz tore into the first movement of the Violin Concerto, with Adams conducting, as if it were adventurous rock ‘n’ roll. I missed the mystery of the work’s wandering melody in her raucous playing, but who wouldn’t be impressed by the sheer visceral energy and virtuosity she brought to the performance as a whole, and by her genuinely thrilling playing of the last movement?

Of special note was baritone Christopher Maltman, richly expressive as the captain in “Klinghoffer” and the soloist in “Wound Dresser.” Michael Collins was the wonderful clarinet soloist in “Gnarly Buttons.” Pianist Rolf Hinds brought colors to the early Minimalist “Phrygian Gates” that I’d never heard before.

But it was the whole rather than any single performance that was the point of the weekend. London now knows Adams well, and it has warmly embraced him. It seemed the only unhappiness the weekend caused was to other British composers, who stayed away en masse, and, of course, to Americans who, having no institutions comparable to the BBC, look on such enterprises with jealousy. When it comes to the treatment of our composers, the British have much to teach us.