After the Fall, John Adams’ spectacularly beautiful and ingratiating new piano concerto, boasts nearly half an hour’s worth of irresistible music. The piece, which had its commissioned world premiere last week by David Robertson and the San Francisco Symphony with the superb Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as soloist, is a richly woven affair, scored with the composer’s characteristic ingenuity and precision. Some aspects of it sound familiar in the context of Adams’ multi-decade career, while some of it feels like an intriguing departure. I heard it twice — once at Thursday morning’s open rehearsal with a score in my lap, and again at that night’s first performance – and fell hard for it both times.

The piece also seems to have some extramusical content — a narrative, a philosophical outlook, something that relates to that evocative title. I don’t know what it is. Bach shows up in the concerto’s last movement, and in the deftly crafted program notes by Thomas May, Adams invokes Pierre Boulez and his modernist take on music history, so there’s something going on here about the influence of the past on living art. Adam and Eve also figure into it somehow, and maybe Paradise Lost. Finally, the title suggests a response to No Such Spring, the masterful piano concerto by Adams’ son Samuel that the Symphony introduced in Davies Symphony Hall two years ago.

I wish I had a story to tell about how those pieces all fit together, or into the larger framework of Adams’ creative career. Instead, I’m left to celebrate the splendors of the notes themselves, which may be enough for now. It’ll have to be, anyway.

After the Fall is in three movements, because that’s the template that Adams, by his own admission, brings to nearly every compositional undertaking. (Scheherazade.2, the explosive four-movement violin concerto he wrote for Leila Josefowicz, is one of the few exceptions, along with the early diptych El Dorado which nobody likes but me.) The sections run together, but they’re so sharply characterized that there’s no mistaking the divisions.

In the opening movement, Adams lays down a carpet of luxuriant orchestral sound, twinkling and shimmering like moonlit musical moss. The soloist emerges against this accompanimental backdrop, but not in a bold or assertive way; rather, the piano’s material weaves in and out of the orchestra, making its presence felt without disruption. And what the piano has to say seems fairly urgent: a gently angular melodic figure that recurs again and again in subtly different guises. The effect is rhythmically propulsive yet soft-edged, like a memory of youthful vigor blurred by time.

In general, After the Fall eschews almost entirely the sort of heroic narrative that infuses the concertos of Beethoven, Liszt, Prokofiev and so many others, in which orchestra and soloist face off against each other for musical fisticuffs. Adams did that last time, with Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, the megawatt piano concerto that he composed for Yuja Wang and that Ólafsson memorably performed with the Symphony in 2022; this time, the mood is more collaborative and congenial. It continues through the translucent slow movement, built around a delicately descending and ascending melody, and into the finale, in which the C-Minor Prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier moves onto the premises and, like some kind of real estate squatter, spreads itself out patiently until all the other music gives up and leaves.

It's a strange creative decision, one that both demands and defies explanation. In this respect, it’s a little like Shostakovich quoting Rossini’s William Tell Overture in his Fifteenth Symphony. (Q: What does it mean? A: Who the hell knows.) Again, whatever interpretive tale there is to be told about this concerto proves elusive. What remains are the vivid and often mercurial details — the metrical hiccups of the slow movement, for example, which blends regular and irregular time signatures, or the nuanced harmonic weave of the finale.

I expect, or I hope, to understand the piece better with further exposure. I love it now.

Elsewhere:

Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “After the Fall, which unfolds over about half an hour in three connected movements, is more introverted and austere than Must the Devil and consciously makes connections across the centuries between Adams and Bach.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “There was the usual Adams kaleidoscope of rapidly changing time signatures and motoric rhythms, but the overall impression was of a colorful gentleness.”
Gabe Meline, KQED: “I’ve never thought of Adams’ music as film soundtrack fodder, but After the Fall is laden with imagery — fields, flight, turbulence, pursuit, heartbeat. The serene second movement is a slow float through mild gales of wind.”

Orff in black

The Symphony paired Adams’ concerto with Carmina burana, Carl Orff’s 1936 cantata based on medieval poetry. The decision was an insult, and a regrettable one, to the Bay Area’s most important and eminent composer. No one had to read between the lines to discern the implications, which might as well have been spelled out in neon: We’ll program the world premiere, but we’re not about to risk losing so much as a nickel by doing so. On the second half we’ll put the cheesiest, tawdriest, most surefire ticket-seller we have in the repertoire.

This was wrong both politically and artistically. I would never want to second-guess the members of the Symphony’s marketing department, who have access to detailed spreadsheets most of us can only dream of. But do they really imagine that Symphony patrons and subscribers, in the year of our Lord 2025, are put off by the prospect of a new work from John Adams, of all people? A composer whose music has been a staple of Davies Hall for some 40 years? I don’t see it. In just the past year and a half, I’ve watched Symphony audiences respond enthusiastically to the far more bracing challenges of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto. Who thought they were going to whimper in terror at the prospect of a premiere by a hometown hero?

And even if they were, what of it? In music, as in politics, people respond to leadership that demonstrates the courage of its convictions. If programming After the Fall was the right decision (spoiler: it was), then stand by it, and let people see you doing so.

All of this would be pertinent even if the companion piece had been, let’s say, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. But Carmina burana taints everything it touches. It’s a ghastly piece of music — repetitive, simple-minded, and resolutely scornful of anything approaching harmonic or contrapuntal substance. We could bring in the piece’s other sins as well, including its fraught history with the Nazi regime and its pilferings from Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Even without getting into those, though, it’s astonishing to contemplate just what an impoverished piece of writing this is.

There are a few exceptions over the course of the nearly hourlong score. The opening chorus (“Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi”) creates an immediate atmosphere of grandiose majesty, helped along by the score’s only hint of harmonic interest. The all-too-brief “Dulcissime,” just four measures of sumptuously cascading melody from the soprano soloist, can cast a spell, especially when done with the florid grace that Susanna Phillips brought to it on this occasion. “Olim lacus colueram,” aka “The Lament of the Roast Swan,” emerged on Thursday as a more ingenious and funny creation than usual, thanks to tenor Arnold Livingston Geis’ bravura rendition, which involved actually singing the punishing high notes rather than ostentatiously squawking them.

But the rest is vacuous rum-te-tum, with rhythmic patterns seemingly inspired by monk-bros slamming their tankards on the table in unison and a choral style that avoids variety as if on principle. The chorus “Ecce gratum” goes for page upon page without ever budging from a single F-major harmony. “Tempus est iocundum,” with its music-hall refrain (“O, O, O/totus floreo”), takes one meager joke and repeats it ad nauseam. And so on, and so forth.

When I was on staff at the Chronicle, I had to soft-pedal these views, because Carmina burana is a piece that so many people adore. Why antagonize them? My reviews of the piece over the years were suffused with tactful silences, and almost always included the phrase “agree to disagree.” No longer. I said what I said.

Elsewhere:

Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “The second half of the program consisted of Carl Orff’s crowd-pleasing cantata Carmina burana, which many love and others, including myself, do not.”
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “For the better part of my mature life, [Carmina burana] has been dismissed as little more than trivial, if not downright infantile. However, time tends to assuage arrogance as well as healing wounds; and it would be fair to say that we now live in an age that is not afraid to have fun with both the text and Orff’s raucous instrumental settings.”

Flat Baroque

One journalistic trope I particularly dislike involves imputing ignorance to the reader. You can see it in phrases like “Such-and-such is the most exciting new artist you’ve never heard of” or “You probably didn’t realize that….” But as soon as any reader thinks “Well, actually, I’m perfectly aware” — and they will think exactly that — you’ve lost them through your own disrespect. It’s a formulation I make sure I never use, and I try to steer students away from it as best I can.

All of this came to mind on Sunday afternoon, when the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment paid a call to Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus with a program titled The Golden Age of the Baroque. It was a greatest-hits affair, with a few sparkling selections amid the dull and dutiful. What set my teeth on edge, though, was the air of grade-school enthusiasm surrounding the event, the sense that the performers felt they were introducing us to something exciting and awesome. Do you folks all know about J.S. Bach? He wrote these pieces called the Brandenburg Concertos, and we’re going to play one of them for you now!

Also: The Four Seasons. And Pachelbel’s Canon.

This is what classical FM radio is for, my dudes. If you’re a period-instrument ensemble traveling all the way from London, surely you can cobble together something more memorable and more intellectually cogent than a bunch of tuneful snippets, strung together like a Baroque-musical pearl necklace. Or if not, then at least execute it all with a bit more pizzazz and urgency.

Those qualities, when they surfaced, were largely the province of soprano Julia Bullock, who recovered from a weak first half to come roaring back after intermission with exquisite selections by Barbara Strozzi, Purcell, and Handel, as well as an encore by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. Trumpeter David Blackadder was a ferocious, charismatic soloist in Purcell’s Trumpet Sonata in D. The program began with “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s Solomon, another overexposed warhorse but done this time with such energetic zest that one felt inclined to give it a pass. And a brief excerpt from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes served as a reminder of how weird and wonderful his music is in any context.

But the overall impression was one of blithe inconsequentiality. There have been various historical periods when the music of the Baroque was rediscovered, to great fanfare and celebration. It happened in the 1830s, thanks to Mendelssohn; it happened in the 1950s and ’60s, producing the flood of LPs that kept arty undergraduates like my parents bopping excitedly to Vivaldi concertos. Those days are over, though. The question now is, what can performers do with what we all already know?

Elsewhere:

Nicholas Jones, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Reprising Johann Pachelbel’s famous Canon and Antonio Vivaldi’s equally familiar ‘Spring’ from The Four Seasons, as well as a baker’s dozen of other Baroque chestnuts, veers close to the kind of easy-listening playlist one might pull up on Spotify as background music while making dinner.”

Cryptic clue of the week

From Out of Left Field #251 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:

Kitty is entertaining leader of Denmark (4)

Last week’s clue:

In Springfield, covering up a bit of risky business (8)

Solution: INDUSTRY
In: IN
Springfield: DUSTY
covering up: going around
a bit of risky: R
business: definition

Coming up

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble: The inventive Bay Area ensemble has planned a two-weekend festival — the first in its history — with weekend concerts in Berkeley and San Francisco. The Winter Wandering Festival combines late masterpieces by Franz Schubert (the sublime C-Major Quintet) and Luigi Nono, along with Schubert’s bleak song cycle Winterreise and music by Laurie San Martin, Addie Camsuzou, and more. Jan. 24-26, various Berkeley locations; Jan. 31-Feb. 2, Noe Valley Ministry. www.leftcoastensemble.org.

Ensemble for These Times: One of the most urgent musical imperatives at this point is to diversify the concert repertoire, making room for women and composers of color who have been historically squeezed out of the process. For six years now, the energetic Bay Area trio Ensemble for These Times has sponsored an annual push to commission and champion works by female and nonbinary composers. This year’s program, a collaboration with Luna Composition Lab titled “Midnight Serenades,” introduces music by Olivia Bennett, Gabriella Carrido, Devon Lee, Lucy Chen, and Madeline Clara Cheng. Jan. 25, Center for New Music. www.centerfornewmusic.com.