City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Jonathan Holland and Wesley Warren, trumpets; Simon Rattle, conductor. EMI Classics CDC 5 55051-2.
John Adams has never fitted comfortably into the Minimalist category. Repetition is central to his music, but so are harmonic direction, orchestral color and the unapologetic emotional grandeur of late Romanticism. Harmonielehre, completed in 1985, is the work in which those apparently contradictory impulses first came together on a monumental scale. Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra understand both sides of the equation. Their performance has the rhythmic precision Minimalism requires, but it also possesses sweep, weight and luxuriant color.
The first movement begins with enormous E-flat minor chords hammered out by the full orchestra. Adams associated this opening with a dream in which an oil tanker rose from San Francisco Bay and shot into the sky. Rattle gives the chords tremendous impact, but the performance does not depend upon sheer volume. As the repeated patterns begin moving beneath the surface, the CBSO plays with remarkable definition. Woodwind lines flicker through the texture, percussion keeps the rhythmic machinery in motion, and the brass supplies brilliance without overwhelming the strings.
Rattle is particularly effective at managing the movement’s long spans. What could become an impressive succession of episodes instead feels like a sustained journey, alternating between explosive propulsion and passages of ecstatic stillness. The orchestra’s attack is sharp and athletic, although the playing never becomes mechanically rigid.
“The Anfortas Wound,” the second movement, reveals the darker side of the score. Its title refers to the wounded guardian of the Holy Grail in Wagner’s Parsifal, and Adams’s music openly embraces the world of late Romantic anguish. Mahler, Wagner and early Schoenberg hover behind the long melodic lines and heavy chromatic harmonies. Rattle allows the music to become genuinely troubled, drawing tense, darkly expressive playing from the lower strings. The climax is powerful precisely because it has been approached patiently rather than inflated from the beginning.
The finale, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,” combines the rhythmic energy of the first movement with the harmonic richness of the second. Its peculiar title joins the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart with the nickname of Adams’s daughter, whom the composer imagined riding through the heavens on the mystic’s shoulder. The music gradually sheds the preceding darkness and moves toward a radiant conclusion. Rattle handles the transformation superbly: the accumulating patterns remain clear even as the orchestral sonority expands into a jubilant blaze of E-flat major.
The remaining works turn the disc into a compact survey of Adams’s orchestral writing. The Chairman Dances, described as a “foxtrot for orchestra,” originated as an outgrowth of Nixon in China. Rattle captures its sly theatricality, keeping the rhythms buoyant while allowing the orchestral colors to shimmer. It is playful without becoming lightweight, and its final winding-down has an unexpected tenderness.
Tromba Lontana is a more contemplative fanfare. Trumpeters Jonathan Holland and Wesley Warren answer one another across the orchestral space, their distant calls emerging from a quiet, suspended background. The Symphony Hall recording preserves the spatial effect effectively.
The program ends with Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and few performances better justify the title. Rattle sets a breathless but controlled pace, with the woodblock maintaining its implacable pulse while the orchestra piles rhythmic figure upon rhythmic figure. The playing is brilliant, precise and exhilarating. It remains one of the most convincing recorded performances of Adams’s popular fanfare.
The 1993 recording is spacious, clean and dynamic, giving the percussion plenty of impact while preserving inner detail. Some listeners may prefer the warmer, more overtly American sonority of Edo de Waart’s San Francisco recording of Harmonielehre, but Rattle brings greater rhythmic bite and structural clarity.
Verdict: An outstanding Adams collection and one of Simon Rattle’s finest Birmingham recordings. The performance of Harmonielehre combines muscular energy with Romantic breadth, while the shorter works make this an exceptionally satisfying introduction to Adams’s orchestral music.
