Adams, J: The Dharma at Big Sur, etc.

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Dharma begins with a violin rhapsody suspended over a drone, but it's no ordinary rhapsody and no ordinary violin. Silverman, playing a solid-bodied six-string electric instrument, is required... — BBC Music Magazine, November 2006, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 25th Sep 2006
Catalogue No: 7559798572
Label: Nonesuch
Length: 53 minutes

The Dharma at Big Sur

Work length26:49

Album only

Tracy Silverman (violin)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
John Adams

Part I: A New Day

Track length14:29

Album only

Part II: Sri Moonshine

Track length12:20

Album only

My Father Knew Charles Ives

Work length26:26

Album only

Bill Houghton (trumpet)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
John Adams

I. Concord

Track length9:35

$1.00

$1.30

II. The Lake

Track length6:40

$1.00

$1.30

III. The Mountain

Track length10:11

Album only

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The latest release from the Pulitizer Prize-winning John Adams – whom the Independent has characterized as ‘One of the most significant and most performed contemporary composers today’ – features two highly acclaimed, recently commissioned orchestral works, The Dharma At Big Sur and My Father Knew Charles Ives, performed here by the BBC Symphony with Adams himself conducting. While panoramic in scope, these multi-part pieces are also deeply personal in nature. Described as ‘autobiographical sound-memories’ by the BBC, they evoke the well-travelled American composer’s east coast/west coast life and wide-ranging musical education. Adams uses as jumping off points his childhood in Vermont and New Hampshire and his grown-up migration to Northern California, where he now lives, paying homage along the way to the composers and writers who have influenced and inspired him, from Henry David Thoreau to Jack Kerouac, Charles Ives to Terry Riley.

Reviews

November 2006

Dharma begins with a violin rhapsody suspended over a drone, but it's no ordinary rhapsody and no ordinary violin. Silverman, playing a solid-bodied six-string electric instrument, is required to evoke a range of music, including psychedelic guitar and the Indian sarangi. My Father, though unmistakeably Adams, is a glorious re-imagining of some of Ives's greatest pieces, a rich, exhilarating homage full of quotations which turn out not to be quotations after all: only a snatch of 'Reveille' and a hint of 'Nearer My God to Thee' are genuine.

2010

Both Charles Ives and John Adams composers grew up in New England and both have a healthy magpie attitude to their source material. Adams begins My Father Knew Charles Ives with the trademark solo trumpet writing he regularly deploys whenever he wants to evoke Ives: here it's like a camera slowly panning towards an Ivesian landscape far below. Brass-band music marches onwards and the famous 'false' last chord of Ives's Second Symphony flashes by. It's difficult to say what exactly Adams has created. It falls somewhere between direct quotation and constructivist allusion, like hearing deconstructed 'picture postcard' Ives. It's fun for sure, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra relish its follies.
Borrowing the experimental composer Lou Harrison's ideas about non-tempered tuning – as Adams does in his Jack Kerouac-inspired electric violin concerto The Dharma at Big Sur – gives another spin to a familiar Adams sound world. Tracy Silverman's folksy material in the concerto partly evolved from his own improvisations, and I fear a one-size-fits-all world-music patois is just around the corner. Nevertheless, the opening section is quite beautiful as non-tempered chords sensuously ebb and flow, and Adams integrates Silverman Adam Orchestral into his developing argument with a strategic sense of purpose. In the cathartic second section harmonic impetus races ahead, as gong-like sounds in the orchestra suggest inner stillness – a trademark Adams hook reborn.

November 2006

My father knew Charles Ives. …John Adams's… acknowledges a spiritual debt to Ives; both composers grew up in New England and both have a healthy magpie attitude to their source material. Adams beings with the trademark solo trumpet writing he regularly deploys whenever he wants to evoke Ives. Brass band music marches onwards and the famous "false" last chord of Ives's Second Symphony flashes by. It's fun for sure, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra relish its follies. Tracy Silverman's folksy material in the concerto partly evolved from his own improvisations... the opening section is quite beautiful as non-tempered chords sensuously ebb and flow, and Adams integrates Silverman into his developing argument with a strategic sense of purpose.

Adams, J: The Dharma at Big Sur, etc.

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