People tend to remember where they were when they first heard John Adams ’s Harmonielehre . For me, it still conjures the sense of wonder as the windows of contemporary musical expression suddenly opened and let in the light. But however well you know it, you wouldn’t forget this Prom in a hurry.
Written in 1984-5, this symphony in all but name marked Adams’s breakthrough from creative block to triumph, exorcising his own creative crisis and that of American (and international) art music. The title is from a treatise by Arnold Schoenberg, whose dodecaphonic (12-tone) system may be the root of that trouble, advocating an equality of every note that rendered the sound frequently incomprehensible. The system had dominated mid-century composition, severing new music from both soul and audience.
Finally Adams jettisoned all that, reclaimed symphonic tradition and blended it with Minimalist techniques to create a mesmerising cri-de-coeur of passion, pain and redemption. Its challenges are immense: the music’s rhythms and textures pound, shift and glisten as only Adams’s can, and the players have to strain many sinews to stay on board. It would be hard to imagine a better performance.
In the hands of Wilson and the Sinfonia of London , every musical cell was urgent with energy, the details diamond-sharp, the pace assured, the balancing of textures unerring and the ensemble unified enough to resemble a giant piece of chamber music. This peerless conductor and his musicians .