World Premiere of John Adams’s New Piano Concerto After the Fall
Vikingur Ólafsson premieres Adams’s After the Fall with the San Francisco Symphony and David Robertson in January before touring the new concerto throughout Europe in the spring.
Acclaimed pianist Vikingur Ólafsson will premiere John Adams’s new piano concerto, After the Fall, with the San Francisco Symphony on January 16–19, conducted by longtime Adams collaborator David Robertson.
Performance Details
January 16-19, 2024
John Adams, After the Fall (World Premiere)
Vikingur Ólafsson, Piano
San Francisco Symphony / David Robertson
Following the world premiere, Ólafsson will tour After the Fall internationally:
- January 22–24: Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich / Paavo Järvi, Zürich
- 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)
A Major Addition to Adams’s Piano Repertoire
After the Fall is John Adams's third full-scale concerto for solo piano, following Century Rolls (1996), written for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), composed for Yuja Wang.
Pianist Vikingur Ólafsson made a powerful impression on Adams when he played Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? across Europe with the composer conducting in Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Reykjavík, and Zurich. In conversation with writer Thomas May, Adams described how impressed he was with Ólafsson’s deep knowledge of his music: “He genuinely loves my music and knows nearly all of it—not just my concertos but the operas and orchestral works.”
Adams in turn became a fan of Ólafsson. “Vikingur possesses an enormously wide bandwidth of expressive possibility. His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, but when the music calls for it, he can make the piano sound huge without banging it. I tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall.”
The title, After the Fall, is a nod to another piano concerto, No Such Spring, by his son Samuel Carl Adams, which was premiered by the pianist Conor Hanick with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2023. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalls. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.”
The double entendre of “fall”—as both the season and the “loss of Paradise”—reminded Adams of Pierre Boulez’s dystopian declaration that “the era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitely over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation. … An ideal or imaginary library provides us with a plethora of models, endless choices and means of exploitation.”
After the Fall, like all of Adams’s music, embraces the very things Boulez pronounced to be symptoms of the Fall: “perpetual return, consolidation, citation.” But, as Thomas May points out, “risks must still be taken—all the more so.” In the culminating section of After the Fall, Adams stages the infiltration of the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, utilizing a similar “hall of mirrors” technique first encountered in his 2012 Beethoven-inspired Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra. The composer wryly notes that while at work on the piece last season, Ólafsson was engaged in an international tour comprising 88 performances of the Goldberg Variations: “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess.”
John Adams’s After the Fall was co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Paris Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Gothenburg Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, and the Wiener Symphoniker.
> Further information on Work: After the Fall
Photo: Deborah O'Grady