John Adams, part 1 of 3

[calimac]

The San Francisco Symphony is performing three programs this month devoted to the composer John Adams - a choral concert, a major work on an orchestral concert, and a chamber music concert - and I'm going to all three.

Is Adams really the major composer of world standing that he looks like from here, or is his apparent importance magnified by his being local to this area? I'm not entirely sure, but what I do know is his music, though not catchy or even tuneful as popularly successful composers are supposed to be, is always well-crafted, more importantly interesting, and more importantly still aesthetically moving and worthy of repeated hearings. All the Adams works on these concerts have been heard before; most of them have been heard by me before, and I want to hear them again.

I'm not sure why I was asked to review the choral concert - that's not my idea of my specialty, and it's the second Christmas oratorio I've reviewed in a month, and me not even a Christian - but there we are. The other thing I don't understand is why the editors italicized the phrase "Herod's Massacre of the Innocents," although it's not the title of a work, and left it that way despite two requests from me to de-italicize it, both accompanied by other requests for editing changes which they did make.

In other news, the SFS is planning a big centennial celebration for next year. Much of it sounds good - I like the idea of bringing in all of the other major orchestras of the US for visiting concerts - but one note clashes.

Perhaps the only obvious absence from the plans is any programming reflecting the state of the musical world in 1911, when the Symphony was born. "We looked at the programs from that period," Assink [the executive director] said, "and there was just nothing interesting about them. So we figured, what's the point?"

Well, look. The Symphony's first concert in 1911 consisted of:

• Wagner, Prelude to Die Meistersinger
• Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, "Pathetique"
• Haydn, Theme and Variations from the Emperor Quartet
• Liszt, Les Preludes

Is there really "nothing interesting" in this? Three of those four items are still in the orchestral repertoire today - I just heard the Wagner from the LA Phil last week, goodness sake - and orchestral enlargements of string quartets are back in fashion, just ask the late Rudolf Barshai, who did it unto Shostakovich, and the even later Gustav Mahler, who did it unto Schubert, and their handiworks are quite often played. If, nevertheless, that program is just too, too retro for Assink's taste to reproduce today, even as a curiosity item - why, there's nothing that's now under a century old in it! - couldn't they consider dribbling its contents out into several different concerts? After all, they do play those works, or others like them, all the time. And if even that would be too much, why not "reflect the state of the musical world in 1911" by playing works that were new that year, even if the SFS of 1911 wouldn't have touched them with a ten-foot pole? Stravinsky's Petrushka was written in 1911; MTT likes Stravinsky. Debussy's La martyre de St. Sebastien and Clarinet Rhapsody, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe suite and Ma Mere l'Oye, Dukas' La Peri, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1, Elgar's Symphony No. 2, Nielsen's Symphony No. 3 (Blomstedt is coming back to conduct some Nielsen: will it be the Third?), Sibelius's Symphony No. 4, Webern's Op. 10, Strauss's opera Ariadne auf Naxos and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, all date at least in part from 1911, and if you're willing to slip a year or two to the side, the selection is even greater. It's a great opportunity. No excuse for such pig-mindedness.