John Adams’s After the Fall is “a Dreamlike Thrill Ride”
Read critical acclaim for John Adams’s new piano concerto for Vikingur Ólafsson following first performances in San Francisco and Zürich.
John Adams’s new piano concerto, After the Fall, has captivated audiences and critics since its debut performances in January. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson premiered the piece with the San Francisco Symphony (Jan 16–19) under longtime Adams collaborator David Robertson, followed by performances with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich (Jan 22–24) led by Paavo Järvi. This is Adams’s third full-scale piano concerto, described as a deeply reflective exploration of past musical forms and ideas.
After the Fall explores the idea of returning to past musical inventions and ideas, and reviewers have praised the concerto’s seamless dialogue between tradition and modernity. The San Francisco Chronicle drew comparisons to “the beautiful transparency of Maurice Ravel’s orchestration and the moodiness of Béla Bartók’s night music." Classical Voice North America noted Adams’s ability to “mine the past and winningly deposit what he finds into his own idiom.”
Notably, the third and final movement includes an allusion to the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. According to _Seen and Heard Internationa_l, Adams weaves Bach-like counterpoint throughout the early sections of the score, culminating in a deeply moving moment when the reference finally emerges: “When the quotation from the Prelude arrives, it feels like the music comes home.” Similarly, KQED praised the recontextualization of Bach’s material, describing it as “a skilled DJ blend that makes you ask, ‘Why hasn’t it been this way all along?’”
Next performances of After the Fall—all featuring Vikingur Ólafsson—include:
March 16: Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich / Paavo Järvi, Hamburg
March 18: Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich / Paavo Järvi, Paris
May 3–4: Wiener Symphoniker / Lahav Shani, Vienna (Musikverein)
Additional performances will be announced in the near future.
Adventures in Music
“nothing short of phenomenal”
“After the Fall constitutes a single-movement entity, subdivided into sections of utmost evocative sonic narratives, displaying Adams’s musical imagination at its finest.”
KQED
“extraordinary ... a remarkable composition”
“After the Fall is laden with imagery—fields, flight, turbulence, pursuit, heartbeat.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“a terrific addition to the composer’s catalog”
“The sparse texture of the repeated rhythmic figurations does invoke Bach — though only Adams could have written the explosive, more densely orchestrated balance of the first movement.”
Sean and Heard International
“a thrill ride that brims with tangy harmonies, dazzling pianistic flourishes and, most of all, a panoply of distinctive rhythms.”
Classical Voice North America
“immediately attractive, rolling along in a stream of consciousness”
“As he has done repeatedly with Beethoven, Adams again has come up with a piece that mines the past and winningly deposits what he finds into his own idiom."
Neue Zürcher Zeitung [translated]
“Stylistically, the work spans the breadth of music history—from the rhythmic pulsations reminiscent of Stravinsky or Bartók ... to the delicate colors of Ravel, blended with a few ‘modern’ experiments.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung [translated]
“The final movement fully comes to life with cascading piano runs, jagged string figures, and pounding chordal pillars that create a powerful groove.”
> Further information on Work: After the Fall
Photo: Brandon Patoc