John Adams mounted the conductor's rostrum in London's Barbican, turned to the audience with a whimsical smile and said, 'I'd like to apologise to Mozart for sandwiching his Third Violin Concerto between two white slabs of American bread' - the slabs of bread being My Father Knew Charles Ives and Naive and Sentimental Music, works he composed during the past six years. Adams is one of the US' foremost living composers, best known for his operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.
His orchestral works are also finding favour and his last London concert, a performance of his 1980 Harmonium, received a standing ovation. He said he was touched as he appreciated how rare standing ovations are in London, compared to the US where they are ubiquitous. At his pre-concert talk, Adams ambled on stage dressed in jeans and walking boots, surveyed the audience and said, 'You know, it's amazing, I get more people to hear me give a pre-concert talk in London than I get for the concert itself in the States.'
His Barbican concert showcased autobiographical works. He grinned wryly and said: 'I'd better confess to you upfront, my father didn't know Charles Ives, but he could have.' Both composers, Ives and Adams' father also played in marching bands. The three movements of the piece, Concord, The Lake and Mountain refer to the New Hampshire landscape that Adams grew up in. In Concord, a hazy Ivesian impressionism gives way to rowdy marching band music. The Lake is Lake Winnipesaukee on the shores of which his grandfather ran a dance hall where his father used to play and where he met and eloped with his mother. The movement is a gauzy nocturne, a painting of a lake in summertime at night.
Naive and Sentimental Music is 'a big symphony, the biggest orchestral work I've ever written', Adams says. As well as being autobiographical, it's also a musical exploration of a dichotomy that the 19th-century German poet Schiller explored in an essay of the same name. Adams interprets Schiller's 'naive' as art that comes into the world spontaneously like a flower opening, whereas the 'sentimental' is art that comes about through great labour.
Adams sees himself as 'desperately trying to find the naive' in this work. His conducting of the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought out a breadth and glow in his work that was reflected in the response of an audience that has taken the man and his music to heart.
