Page 239 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

But all’s fair in art and war, and you just have to take your chance. John Adams, who made his
name with Nixon in China and some would say is America’s most distinguished living composer,
found his brand-new piece Frenzy – here receiving its world premiere – put up against not one but
three pieces by George Gershwin, which some might say was a little unkind of the LSO’s
management. Two of them were the irresistibly fizzing overtures to the musicals Let ‘Em Eat Cake
and Strike Up The Band, played by the orchestra under Simon Rattle with that hip-swaying, sassy
energy that is the LSO’s speciality.
The third was his Piano Concerto, in which the pianist was that Russian-born American pianist
who started out in jazz, Kirill Gerstein. It was longer and more ambitious, but still with that
tendency to simply fling a new melody at us whenever the music threatened to run out of steam –
or better still, repeat an old one, with yet more whooping horns and swooning strings. Gerstein
flung off the concerto with a pleasingly light touch, the Liszt-like heroic octaves touched in with
feathery delicacy, and managed to make that oft-repeated melody seem different each time round.

Against all that, did Adams’s new piece hold its own? Yes, just about, though it helped that his
piece wasn’t the only one to offer a more serious sort of Americana, in this all-American
programme. There was also the Depression-era Third Symphony by Roy Harris, a composer whose
brand of rugged, austere counterpoint, touched by hymnody and folk music, is about as far from
Gershwin’s cheeky pizzazz as you could imagine. The sturdy opening melody suggestive of honest,
sweat-of-the-brow toil was etched with heroic force by the cellos and violas, and the change to
pastoral lightness and the subtle shifts in tempo – sounding like an Americanised form of
Sibelius’s Nordic landscapes – were handled by Rattle and the orchestra with sympathetic subtlety.

By contrast Adams’s new piece expressed a single state of breathless agitation across nearly 20
minutes. Adams certainly proved more than capable of overcoming a persistent problem of
contemporary composers – an inability to write fast music. He did this partly by juxtaposing
different pulses, with ticking three-beat pulses in woodblocks and marimbas pushing against
hammered four-beat patterns in the strings. But more important was that Adams turned what
could have been a dry rhythmic game into a tense nocturnal chase, with a touch of film
noir glamour similar to Adams’s previous LSO commission City Noir, and moments of uncanny
neon-lit stillness. As the panic-stricken final ascent built to a climax, I found myself imagining
James Stewart running up that bell-tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. You don’t get much more
frenzied than that. IH
Watch this concert on marquee.tv on March 28. Listen to it on BBC Radio 3 later this year.