Kazuki conducts a review of Harmonium – John Adams’ music for the US concert hall | Classical music

Oharchestras will throw themselves into this year’s commemoration of American Independence (or “250 Independence” as the promoters are charmingly calling it) with the enthusiasm born of a group of big names and great enthusiasm. The year of Gershwin, Barber and Bernstein, Adams and Glass? Full halls all around. You can also throw in John Williams and Duke Ellington (just go easy on Carter and Crumb) and you’ve got a winner. Just ask Kazuki Yamada and the generous Symphony Hall audience on Friday night.

The Harmonium – John Adams’ famous experiment in 1980 in extreme minimalism – was the announced venue (and will go to the Proms with the CBSO later this month), but the design was interesting here: it was designed by Yamada as two musical panels.

How beautiful to run the memory of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man directly into the composer’s Lincoln Portrait. The president’s voice (delivered with great emphasis by soprano Janai Brugger) sits beneath the middle strings and longing woodwinds. Beautiful and slow moving, it was enough to inspire the Limeys hall to patriotism.

A similar sequence began in Europe with Florence Price’s 1941 musical cycle The Heart of A Woman. (newly arranged by Lior Rosner) and Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1987). Quieter than Copland, Tower is an unapologetically feminine voice, a musical refusal to apologize for taking up space in a classical concert hall. For example, it was a perfect hedge of a tree; he was apparently a judge from the present day drifting to the idealism under the direction of the closed, sweetly integrated, multifaceted writings of Langston Hughes.

Circle and Tree is the pinnacle of musical theater – slowly entering Broadway in the flirtatious, powerful hit “Don’t tell me no”, giving us glorious Technicolor in the rhapsodic “My Dream” and the sparkling fantasy “For my son”. It’s all good enough, especially when played heavily by Brugger, but the additional orchestral music puts a pressure on these little things that nothing of its own can help.

From the micro to the macro on Adams’ fascinating scale. The Harmonium is essentially a concerto for choir and orchestra, a very short mechanical journey that bends time: stopping in “Because I could not stand Death”; the fastest in “Wild Nights”. Yamada’s energy is full, but the CBSO Chorus is shy, behind the beat. Bring on the Proms with a full sonic juggernaut.