John Adams at 70:
Grand Pianola Music
Sat 25 Feb 7.30pm, Hall
John Adams Chamber Symphony
Timo Andres Steady Hand
for two pianos and orchestra
(world premiere)
interval 20 minutes
Philip Glass Music in Similar Motion*
John Adams Grand Pianola Music
Timo Andres, David Kaplan pianos
Britten Sinfonia
Britten Sinfonia Academy*
Synergy Vocals
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
Tonight’s concert is being recorded
by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast
on Monday 27 February
Supported by Yamaha
Part of Barbican Presents 2016 –17
Image: Margaretta Mitchell
‘Music is above and
beyond all else...
It’s about feeling.’
John Adams
John Adams at 70
Welcome
Welcome to this concert, part of our ‘Sounds
that Changed America’ series. Tonight
we celebrate the music of John Adams,
whose 70th birthday was on 15 February.
Adams has long been a vital force in
contemporary music. He draws richly on
diverse sources of music, including the
sounds of his childhood, his own experience
as a clarinettist, cartoons, The Beatles,
American minimalism, John Cage and the
soundscape of contemporary city life. His
music grows out of real-life events, such
as 9/11 or Nixon’s visit to China. The result
has an immediacy to it, yet it is also multilayered, revealing itself only gradually.
John Adams has talked about the two
sides of his writing – the trickster sitting
alongside the serious-minded – in a way
that Beethoven and Schumann would
also have recognised. In that respect,
he is very much part of a tradition.
Tonight we get a chance to encounter
that trickster, in the form of the Chamber
Symphony and Grand Pianola Music. For the
latter, the keyboard players are Timo Andres
and David Kaplan. They will also give the
world premiere of Andres’s Steady Hand,
an apt title for a double piano concerto.
Andres dedicates the work to John Adams,
whom he describes as an ‘inspiration and a
lodestar’. Completing the concert is another
key figure in our ‘Sounds that Changed
America’ series: Philip Glass. We’re
delighted to welcome the young players of
Britten Sinfonia Academy onstage alongside
their mentors. We’re also particularly
grateful to conductor Benjamin Shwartz,
who stepped in at short notice after Joana
Carneiro had to cancel for the happiest
of reasons, having recently given birth.
I hope you enjoy the concert –
and Happy Birthday, John.
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
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Huw Humphreys
Head of Music
John Adams in context
If someone with no knowledge of contemporary
classical music asked you to name a composer
who encapsulates the spirit of our age, who would
you choose?
It’s an impossible question to answer, of course.
No single composer can claim to represent the
20th century in its entirety, with its bewildering
array of styles, forms and techniques. John
Adams, however, comes pretty close.
For sure, it helped that he was born almost exactly
halfway through the century (1947 to be precise).
This placed him in the somewhat fortunate
position of being able to take stock of the many
exciting features that heralded the rise of musical
modernism during the first half of the century, such
as Debussy and Ravel’s striking use of orchestral
colour, Stravinsky’s rhythmic innovations,
Schoenberg’s advances in chromaticism and
atonality and the experimentations with musical
sound and space conducted by Ives and Varèse.
Adams was just coming of age as a composer
in the late 1960s when the avant-garde started
to collapse under the weight of its own selfperpetuating ideology: ‘disintegrating on an
instant in the explosion of mania, or lapsing
for ever into a classic fatigue’, to almost quote
W H Auden. Avoiding modernism’s manic
explosions and classic fatigues, Adams looked
instead to a musical style that defined more his
John Adams at 70
The Sounds that changed America:
own time and place: minimalism. He had just
missed out on minimalism’s loud stirrings in the
lofts of downtown New York during the early
1970s, but seized on its potential as one technique
among many when forming his own musical
language during the late 1970s, in fresh and
energetic compositions such as Phrygian Gates
(1977) for solo piano, and Shaker Loops (1978) for
string septet.
It also helped that Adams’s background and
upbringing instilled in him a natural inquisitiveness
about music in terms both of its stylistic diversity
and its rich social and cultural contexts. His
parents were keen amateur musicians – his father
played clarinet and saxophone while his mother
sang; they both performed in big bands around
Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Adams
followed his father by taking up the clarinet,
but this took him away from jazz to Harvard
University, where he studied from 1965 to1971.
Harvard had by then become a something of
a hotbed for serial techniques (the method of
composing using all 12 notes of the chromatic
scale) and both Adams’s teachers, Leon Kirchner
and Earl Kim, had once been pupils of Arnold
Schoenberg. More interested in listening to The
Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour than constructing
magic squares from tone rows, Adams eventually
headed west to San Francisco in 1972, where
he taught composition at the conservatory for
10 years, conducting the New Music Ensemble
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
3
Stream or download our Barbican Classical Music podcasts
for exclusive interviews from some of the finest artists in
classical music. Recent podcasts include Jonathan Biss,
John Adams, Gerald Barry, Barbara Hannigan, Sir James
MacMillan, George Benjamin, Andrew Norman, Iestyn
Davies, Joyce DiDonato and Nico Muhly.
Available on the Acast app, iTunes, Soundcloud and
the Barbican website
in concerts that ranged from Cage to Machaut’s
Messe de Nostre Dame.
Indeed, Cage’s influential book of writings,
Silence, opened the door for Adams; but what
he saw when he walked through it was not
chance-based music but the pattern-based, pulseheavy, consonant, life-affirming rallying cry of
minimalism. His early works in particular draw
from this smorgasbord. For example, Part 1 of
Grand Pianola Music (1982) uses a pulsing rhythm
throughout that can be traced back to Terry Riley’s
In C (an idea that was suggested to Riley by his
friend and co-performer Steve Reich, in fact).
These pulses eventually lead to a dramatic series
of sweeping arpeggios across both pianos that
sway back and forth between B flat major and
B minor in a chord progression that takes a leaf
out of Philip Glass’s harmony textbook.
Echoes of Riley, Reich and Glass jostle for
supremacy amid the stylistic scramble. But the
minimalists are not alone. Anything is fair game
in Adams’s A–Z of musical quotations; and in
Part 3, the opening chords from Beethoven’s
‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata are also given the
Adams treatment, clothed this time in Liberacestyle satin and sequins.
There’s the rub. Adams’s music captures the
boundless energy and dizzying, whirligig motion
of 21st-century life, full of fast cars and wild nights.
Equally, its sounds resonate with a century caught
up in psychological conflicts, fraught with political
power struggles, pumped up with prejudice and
bigotry yet deflated by depression, desperation
and self-doubt. His music often plays out a grisly
paradox where scientific and technological
advancements have enriched and enlightened our
world beyond measure, yet at the same time led
us to the brink of total self-destruction.
Adams, to quote Alex Ross, is ‘a child of the 20th
century in all its manifestations.’ His music is
‘present-tense American romanticism, honoring
the ghosts of Mahler and Sibelius, plugging
into minimalist processes, swiping sounds from
jazz and rock, browsing the files of postwar
innovation.’
But if Adams is a child of the last century, what
about the children of the 21st? In Timo Andres,
the relationship between the musical past and
present changes once again. His reconstruction
of Mozart’s ‘Coronation’ Concerto deliberately
blurred the edges between original and copy, but
the shimmering chordal pulses at the beginning
of ‘Antennae’ inhabit a sensory sound world
in which Adams himself would feel equally at
home. Tonight we get to experience a concerto
that is pure Andres and, appropriately enough, is
dedicated to Adams.
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Cocking a snook at the musical elite, Grand
Pianola Music’s brash homage ruffled a few
critical feathers at its first performance but
disclosed a playful aspect to Adams’s character
that subsequently found voice in what the
composer refers to as his ‘trickster’ pieces. These
Introduction © Pwyll ap Siôn
jocular, mischievous, extrovert works function as
musical antidotes to dark, weighty, serious Adams.
For every Doctor Atomic there is Gnarly Buttons;
To read Pwyll ap Siôn’s interactive article about the
for every The Wound-Dresser a Fearful Symmetries. whole ‘Sounds that Changed America‘ series, visit
barbican.org.uk/reichglassadams
Chamber Symphony (1992)
1 Mongrel Airs
2 Aria with Walking Bass
3 Roadrunner
Programme notes
John Adams (born 1947)
Britten Sinfonia
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
sonorities. Chamber music, with its inherently
polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles,
was always difficult for me to compose. But the
Schoenberg symphony provided a key to unlock
that door, and it did so by suggesting a format in
which the weight and mass of a symphonic work
could be married to the transparency and mobility
of a chamber work. The tradition of American
cartoon music – and I freely acknowledge that
I am only one of a host of people scrambling
to jump on that particular bandwagon – also
suggested a further model for a music that was
at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic.
I originally set out to write a children’s piece,
There were several other models from earlier
and my intentions were to sample the voices of
in the century, most of which I come to know as
children and work them into a fabric of acoustic
a performer, which also served as suggestive:
and electronic instrumets. But before I began
Milhaud’s La création du monde, Stravinsky’s
that project I had another one of those strange
Octet and L’histoire du soldat, and Hindemith’s
interludes that often leads to a new piece. This one marvelous Kleine Kammermusik, a little-known
involved a brief moment of what Melville called
masterpiece for woodwind quintet that predates
‘the shock of recognition’: I was sitting in my studio, Ren and Stimpy by nearly 60 years.
studying the score to Schoenberg’s Chamber
Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware Despite all the good humour, my Chamber
that my 7-year-old son Sam was in the adjacent
Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult
room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old
to play. Unlike Phrygian Gates or Pianola, with
ones from the 1950s). The hyperactive, insistantly
their fundamentally diatonic palettes, this new
aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons
piece, in what I suppose could be termed my postmixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself Klinghoffer language, is linear and chromatic.
hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive,
Instruments are asked to negotiate unreasonably
and I realised how much these two traditions had difficult passages and alarmingly fast tempos,
in common.
often to the inexorable click of the trap set. But
therein, I suppose, lies the perverse charm of the
For a long time my music has been conceived for
piece. (‘Discipliner et Punir’ was the original title of
large forces and has involved broad brushstrokes the first movement, before I decided on ‘Mongrel
on big canvases. These works have been either
Airs’ to honour a British critic who complained
symphonic or operatic, and even the ones for
that my music lacked breeding.) The Chamber
smaller forces such as Phrygian Gates, Shaker
Symphony is dedicated to Sam.
Loops or Grand Pianola Music have essentially
been studies in the acoustical power of massed
Programme note © John Adams
5
Written for 15 instruments and lasting 22 minutes,
the Chamber Symphony bears a suspicious
resemblance to its eponymous predecessor,
the Op 9 of Arnold Schoenberg. The choice of
instruments is roughly the same as Schoenberg’s,
although mine includes parts for synthesizer,
percussion (a trap set), trumpet and trombone.
However, whereas the Schoenberg symphony is
in one uninterrupted structure, mine is broken into
three discrete movements ‘Mongrel Airs’; ‘Aria
with Walking Bass’ and ‘Roadrunner.’ The titles
give a hint of the general ambience of the music.
Timo Andres (born 1985)
Steady Hand for two pianos and orchestra
(2016) world premiere
Steady Hand was commissioned by the Barbican Centre and Britten Sinfonia, and is dedicated
to John Adams for his 70th birthday.Britten Sinfonia would like to acknowledge the generosity of
three anonymous donors to their Musically Gifted campaign, who have supported this commission.
1 Groundwork
2 Bruckner Boulevard
Timo Andres, David Kaplan pianos
Britten Sinfonia
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
I’ve become increasingly interested in using small
discrepancies in music – a rhythmic hiccup in an
otherwise regular theme, the distance between
two pianos, the dissonant overhang of a note – to
give rise to larger musical structures. In Steady
Hand, a concerto for two pianos, I tried to make
this process as audible as I could.
Writing for two of the same instruments naturally
makes this easier. Throughout the piece, the
pianos mirror, foil and compete with each other.
This conspiratorial dynamic is natural in chamber
music, but makes for a slightly odd concerto.
Where does the orchestra fit in, superseded in its
traditional roles of antagonist or accompanist?
Here, it’s a third character in the drama, with its
own collective goals sometimes intersecting with
the soloists but often standing in stark contrast to
them.
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In fact, the pianos don’t play in consort with the
orchestra until more than halfway through the
first movement, ‘Groundwork’. The piece opens
with one of those deceptively simple melodies,
incorporating a small rhythmic kink, thereby
jumping forward by a quaver with each repetition.
The second piano plays the same theme, offset by
a semiquaver, adding another layer of rhythmic
activity. But the music stays quite regular, strophic,
even singable.
The orchestra, in contrast, is overcast and
ambiguous, playing a slow, chromatic chorale
which drifts downwards, never resolving, over
which slowed-down fragments of the piano’s
melody echo and disappear. This dichotomy
– simple, concrete musical objects fracturing
into arrhythmic clouds – delineates the musical
structure throughout the rest of the piece.
Instigated by more and more complex rhythmic
jostling, the second half of the movement is a loud
mirror of the first.
The second movement, ‘Bruckner Boulevard,’
takes the ‘fast notes’ from the first-movement
theme and compresses them into rollicking piano
arpeggios, under which a stretched-out version of
the chromatic chorale is played. This is eventful,
distracted-driving music – as if densely packed city
blocks are seen through the window of a speeding
taxi. Two distinct processes work themselves out
during the first half of this movement: rhythmic
durations become longer and slower, while the
harmony changes more rapidly. Eventually, they
reconcile, falling into a new section in which the
pianos play ornate arches over a now-stable
orchestral pedal. As the arches expand in range,
volume and harmonic complexity, all of the
previous materials in the piece begin to ricochet
around the orchestra until all the themes are finally
heard together in a big, brassy pile-up.
Steady Hand is dedicated to John Adams, who
continues to be an inspiration and a lodestar.
Programme note © Timo Andres
interval 20 minutes
Music in Similar Motion (1969, orch 1981)
Britten Sinfonia Academy
Britten Sinfonia
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
Unlike the four aforementioned works, Music in
Similar Motion engages in a more direct way with
harmony. This is made obvious by the inclusion
at various points of a prominent bass line. Keith
Potter has described the resulting piece as ‘the
most sophisticated instance’ up until that point of
Glass’s exploration of the additive technique. In
grasping the size and scope of Music in Similar
Motion, one need look no further than Potter’s
detailed account of the work in his book Four
Musical Minimalists. Potter divides the work’s 34
units into four sections. The first section presents
the overall outline of the work in microcosm, with
the opening eight-note pattern (itself subdivided
into 2+3+3) undergoing small-scale expansion
and contraction in its first five units. Units 6–11 see
the introduction of parallel fourths, while a bass
line is added to units 12–23. Further expansion is
applied in the final section (units 24–34) through
further harmonic enrichment. Across these four
parts, Glass builds impressively large proportions
out of the additive technique, applied in a more
rigorous and systematic manner than in previous
works.
As is the case with Glass’s early output, both
instrumentation and duration are variable, the
latter dependent on the number of repetitions
played. In 1981, Glass orchestrated Music
in Similar Motion for a performance by the
American Composers Orchestra under Dennis
Russell Davies. This evening’s performance is
based on this version.
Programme note © Pwyll ap Siôn
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Composed by Philip Glass in November
1969, Music in Similar Motion represents the
culmination of the composer’s so-called early
‘classic’ minimalist style. The main features of this
comprised the repetition of short units played
at loud volume by Glass’s ensemble (consisting
in this case of flute, two saxophones and three
electric organs), in homogenous movement,
underpinned by regular pulsation. Glass had
gradually explored aspects of this style in several
works leading up to Music in Similar Motion. These
included the process of forming larger musical
units out of smaller ones through addition, first
applied to rhythm in 1+1, rhythm and line in Two
Pages, then extended to a ‘thickening’ of line and
parallel motion in Music in Fifths and followed
by symmetrical movement in Music in Contrary
Motion.
Programme notes
Philip Glass (born 1937)
John Adams
Grand Pianola Music (1982)
Part 1A (fast) –
Part 1B (slow)
Part 2 ‘On the Dominant Divide’ (fast)
Synergy Vocals
Timo Andres, David Kaplan pianos
Britten Sinfonia
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
8
When Grand Pianola Music was first
performed in New York (in 1982 in a festival of
contemporary music organised and conducted
by the composer Jacob Druckman) the audience
response included a substantial and (to me)
shocking number of ‘boos’. True, it was a very
shaky performance, and the piece came at the
end of a long concert of new works principally by
serialist composers from the Columbia–Princeton
school. In the context of this otherwise rather
sober repertoire Grand Pianola Music must
doubtless have seemed like a smirking truant
with a dirty face, in need of a severe spanking.
To this day, it has remained a weapon of choice
among detractors who wish to hold up my work
as exemplary of the evils of Postmodernism or
– even more drastic – the pernicious influences
of American consumerism on high art. In truth
I had very much enjoyed composing the piece,
doing so in a kind of trance of automatic recall,
where almost any and every artefact from my
musical subconscious was allowed to float to the
surface and encouraged to bloom. The piece
could only have been conceived by someone
who had grown up surrounded by the detritus of
mid-20th century recorded music. Beethoven and
Rachmaninov soak in the same warm bath with
Liberace, Wagner, The Supremes, Charles Ives
and John Philip Sousa.
But Grand Pianola Music genuinely upset
people, doubtless due to the bombastic finale,
‘On the Dominant Divide,’ with its flag-waving,
gaudy tune rocking back and forth between the
pianos amid ever-increasing cascades of B flat
major arpeggios. I meant it neither as a joke
nor a nose-thumbing at the tradition of earnest,
serious contemporary music, nor an intended
provocation of any kind. It was rather, in its
loudest and most hyperventilated moments, a
kind of Whitmanesque yawp, an exhilaration of
good humour, certainly a parody and therefore
ironic. But it was never intended, as has since
been intimated, as a ‘political’ statement about
the state of ‘new music’. Nevertheless, I was
alarmed by the severity of its reception, and for
years I found myself apologising for it (‘I’ve got to
take that piece down behind the barn and shoot
it’). Now, though, I’m impressed by its boldness.
As with Harmonielehre, which began with a
dream of a huge oil tanker rising like a Saturn
rocket out of the waters of San Francisco Bay,
Grand Pianola Music also started with a dream
image in which, while driving down Interstate
Route 5, I was approached from behind by two
long, gleaming, black stretch limousines. As the
vehicles drew up beside me they transformed
into the world’s longest Steinway pianos … 20,
Programme notes
Despite the image that inspired it, and despite
the heft of its instrumentation, Grand Pianola
Music is, for the most part, a surprisingly delicate
piece. The woodwinds putter along in a most
unthreatening fashion while waves of rippling
piano arpeggios roll in and out like slow tides.
Three female voices (the sirens) sing wordless
harmony, sometimes floating above the band
in long sostenuto triads while at other times
imitating the crisp staccato of the winds and
brass.
The principal technique of the piano writing
was suggested to me by the behaviour of
tape and digital delays, where a sound can
be repeated electronically in a fraction of a
second. The two-piano version of this kind of
delay was accomplished by having both pianists
play essentially the same material, but with one
slightly behind the other, usually a semiquaver or
a quaver note apart. This gives the piano writing
its unique shimmer.
Grand Pianola Music is in two parts, the first
being in fact two movements joined together
without pause. Of these the second is a slow
serene pasture with grazing tuba. The finale,
‘On the Dominant Divide’, was an experiment in
applying my minimalist techniques to the barest
of all possible chord progressions, I–V–I. I had
noticed that most ‘classical’ minimalist pieces
always progressed by motion of thirds in the
bass and that in all cases they strictly avoided
tonic–dominant relations, relations which are
too fraught with a pressing need for resolution.
What resulted was a swaying, rocking oscillation
of phrases that gave birth to a melody. This tune,
in the heroic key of E flat major, is repeated a
number of times, and with each iteration it gains
in gaudiness and Lisztian panache until it finally
goes over the top to emerge in the gurgling C
major of the lowest registers of the pianos. From
here it is a gradually accelerating race to the
finish, with the tonalities flipping back and forth
from major to minor, urging those gleaming
black vehicles on to their final ecstasy.
Programme note © John Adams
9
maybe even 30 feet long. Screaming down the
highway at 90 mph, they gave off volleys of B flat
and E flat major arpeggios. I was reminded of
walking down the hallways of the San Francisco
Conservatory, where I used to teach, hearing the
sonic blur of 20 or more pianos playing Chopin,
the ‘Emperer’ Concerto, Hanon, Rachmaninov,
the Maple Leaf Rag and much more.
Composer profile
Christine Allcino
As conductor, Adams leads the world’s major
orchestras in repertoire that ranges from
Beethoven and Mozart to Stravinsky, Ives,
Carter, Zappa, Glass and Ellington. Conducting
engagements in recent and future seasons include
the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin, Los
Angeles and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic
orchestras and the BBC, London and Vienna
Symphony orchestras, as well as orchestras in
Houston, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Seattle, Baltimore
and Madrid.
John Adams
Composer, conductor, and creative thinker –
John Adams occupies a unique position in the
world of music. His works stand out among
contemporary classical compositions for their
depth of expression, brilliance of sound and the
profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Works
spanning more than three decades are among
the most performed of all contemporary classical
music, among them Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops,
El Niño, the Chamber Symphony and The Dharma
at Big Sur.
His stage works, all in collaboration with director
Peter Sellars, have transformed the genre of
contemporary music theatre. Of Adams’s bestknown opera, The New Yorker magazine wrote
‘Not since Porgy and Bess has an American opera
won such universal acclaim as Nixon in China.’
10
Nonesuch Records has recorded all of Adams’s
music over the past three decades. The latest
release is Scheherazade.2, Adams’s latest work,
a dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra
written for Leila Josefowicz.
This year John Adams celebrates his 70th
birthday with festivals of his music in Europe and
the US, including special retrospectives here at
the Barbican, as well as at Cité de la Musique
in Paris and in Amsterdam, New York, Geneva,
Stockholm, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Born and raised in New England, he learned the
clarinet with his father and played in marching
bands and community orchestras during his
formative years. He began composing at the
age of 10 and his first orchestral pieces were
performed while just a teenager.
He has received honorary doctorates from Yale,
Harvard, Northwestern, Cambridge and the
Juilliard School. A provocative writer, he is author
of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah
Junction and is a frequent contributor to the New
York Times Book Review.
John Adams is Creative Chair of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic. His new opera, Girls of the Golden
West, an opera about the California Gold Rush,
will be premiered in November in San Francisco.
The official John Adams website is
www.earbox.com.
Larry Garf
Opera is a mainstay of his schedule. In 2013 he
conducted a new staging of Berlioz’s Béatrice et
Bénédict for the Deutsches Nationaltheater und
Staatskapelle Weimar and made his debut at
the Royal Swedish Opera with Die Fledermaus,
where he returned last year for La bohème. He
has also conducted Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims,
Bellini’s La sonnambula and Gounod’s Faust
at the Curtis Institute. He recently recorded Poul
Ruders’s latest opera with the Odense Symphony
Orchestra and is set to record works by Vasco
Mendonça with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in 2017.
He has conducted, among others, the Los
Angeles and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic
orchestras, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra
and the Gulbenkian Orchestra.
Benjamin Shwartz
Benjamin Shwartz conductor
His repertoire choices in Wrocław and the range
of his work elsewhere reflect his open-minded
approach to music-making. During the 2015/16
season, he presented Bernstein’s The Age of
Anxiety, developed in collaboration with the
sculptor, painter and stage designer Alexander
Polzin. The result used music and paintings
to show how events of the early 20th century
irreversibly altered music and perceptions of
life. The programme was repeated with the
Wrocław Philharmonic earlier this month.
Timo Andres
Timo Andres composer/piano
Composer and pianist Timo Andres was born
in 1985 in Palo Alto, California and grew up in
rural Connecticut and now lives in Brooklyn. He
is a Nonesuch Records artist: his newest album of
orchestral works, Home Stretch, has been hailed
for its ‘playful intelligence and individuality,’
(The Guardian) and of his debut album for two
pianos, Shy and Mighty, Alex Ross wrote in
The New Yorker that ‘it achieves an unhurried
grandeur that has rarely been felt in American
music since John Adams came on the scene.’
Andres’s notable works include Strong Language,
a string quartet for the Takács Quartet,
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From 2013 to 2016 he was Music Director of
NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, with which he
has begun a series of recordings of works by
Paweł Mykietyn, the first of which is released
next month. He was formerly Resident Conductor
at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
and Music Director of the San Francisco Youth
Orchestra. He is co-founder of Mercury Soul,
a pioneering music project created in 2008
with DJ and composer Mason Bates and visual
artist, designer and director Anne Patterson.
Michael Wilson
Critics have hailed Benjamin Shwartz for the
intensity of his music making, the clear vision
of his interpretations and his broad repertoire.
His schedule for this season underlines this
scope, ranging from a production of Bernstein’s
Candide for Oper Köln and tonight’s John
Adams celebration to Mahler’s Symphony
No 4 and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
About the performers
About the performers
Recent highlights include commissions for the
New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber
Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra
and a piano quintet for Jonathan Biss and
the Elias Quartet. He has toured the US
with fellow composer/performer, Gabriel
Kahane, and frequently appears with Philip
Glass, performing the latter’s complete
piano Études throughout the world.
As a pianist, Timo Andres has given solo
recitals at Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, the
Phillips Collection, (le) Poisson Rouge and San
Francisco Performances. He appeared at the
2014 Ojai Festival with the Knights Chamber
Orchestra, and performed Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue a number of tiems with
the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra.
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Timo Andres earned both his bachelor’s
and master’s degrees from the Yale
School of Music. He is one sixth of the
Sleeping Giant composers’ collective.
Samantha West
commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver
Hall Concert Series, and The Blind Banister, a
piano concerto for Jonathan Biss and the Saint
Paul Chamber Orchestra. Co-commissioned
by the SPCO with Caramoor Center for Music
and the Arts, and the Orchestra of St Luke’s, this
concerto was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The
New York Philharmonic and Biss perform the
work in April 2017. Other highlights this season
include world premieres given by the Boston
Symphony Orchestra and Britten Sinfonia; the
world premiere of a piano concerto by Ingram
Marshall – written specifically for Timo Andres –
with John Adams and the LA Philharmonic; and
an appearance at the National Arts Centre in
Ottawa, where he received the City of Toronto
Glenn Gould Protégé Prize, an award for which
he was selected as recipient by Philip Glass.
David Kaplan
David Kaplan piano
The pianist David Kaplan has appeared at
the Barbican Centre and at Miami’s Arscht
Center with Itzhak Perlman, and has worked
with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Recent recital appearances include the
Ravinia Festival, Sarasota Opera House
and the National Gallery, Washington DC,
and forthcoming highlights include Music on
Main in Vancouver and Strathmore’s Music
at the Mansion in Baltimore. As a concerto
soloist he often conducts from the keyboard,
and recently performed Schumann’s Piano
Concerto and Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto.
He has a particular interest in drawing
connections between music of the past and of the
present, resulting in New Dances of the League of
David, a piano suite that combines Schumann’s
Davidsbündlertänze with new commissions
from Augusta Read Thomas, Caroline Shaw,
Gabriel Kahane and Andrew Norman.
This season, as well as his work as a soloist, he
collaborates with the Enso and Ariel Quartets,
performs a new violin sonata by Christopher
Cerrone with Rachel Lee Priday, gives a joint
recital with Caroline Shaw and appears with
long-time collaborator Timo Andres, including
tonight’s premiere of Steady Hand. As a core
member of Decoda, the affiliate ensemble of
Carnegie Hall, he performs frequently in New
York’s leading venues, as well as throughout
He was awarded a DMA by Yale University
in 2014 and his distinguished mentors over
the years include the late Claude Frank,
Alfred Brendel, Richard Goode and Emanuel
Ax. Before entering Yale, he studied at the
University of California, Los Angeles, with
Walter Ponce and, under the auspices of a
Fulbright Grant, he studied conducting with Lutz
Köhler at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
(l–r) Heather Cairncross, Micaela Haslam, Joanna Forbes L’Estrange
Synergy Vocals
Micaela Haslam director
Synergy Vocals specialises in close-microphone
singing and has developed a close relationship
with Steve Reich over more than 20 years. The
group is also associated with the music of
Louis Andriessen, Steven Mackey and Berio, in
particular, performing regularly with Ensemble
Modern, Ictus, Ensemble Intercontemporain,
London Sinfonietta and the Colin Currie Group.
The group’s world premieres include Steve
Reich’s Three Tales and Daniel Variations, Steven
Mackey’s Dreamhouse, Louis Andriessen’s La
commedia, David Lang’s writing on water and
Sir James MacMillan’s Since it was the day
of Preparation, as well as the UK premiere of
Nono’s monumental Prometeo at the Southbank
Centre.
About the performers
David Kaplan’s discography includes works
by Mohammed Fairouz and Timo Andres
(the highly acclaimed Shy and Mighty).
Synergy has given concerts all over the world
with orchestras and ensembles including the
Boston, Chicago, London, New World, St Louis,
San Francisco, Shanghai and Sydney Symphony
orchestras, the Los Angeles and New York
Philharmonic orchestras, Nexus, Steve Reich &
Musicians and all five BBC orchestras. It has also
collaborated with dance companies including the
Royal Ballet, Rosas and Opéra de Paris.
As well as live concerts and recordings, the
group has undertaken educational and outreach
projects in the UK, The Netherlands, the USA
(including at Princeton University, Eastman
College, Oberlin College and for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra) and South America,
coaching vocal ensembles and workshopping
new works for voices. Micaela Haslam also
coaches ensembles for Steve Reich in the
preparation of his Music for 18 Musicians, often
with the composer at the piano.
Synergy Vocals is featured on a variety of TV
advertisements, pop backing tracks and film
soundtracks, including Nanny McPhee, The
Chronicles of Narnia, Wrath of the Titans, Harry
Potter, Triangle, Severance and Jane Eyre. Four of
its female vocalists feature on the signature tune
and soundtrack to ITV’s recent series Home Fires.
Its recordings include the 2011 Grammy-winning
Dreamhouse, Andriessen’s De Staat and La
commedia, Reich’s Three Tales, Kompendium’s
Beneath the Waves, These New Puritans’ Field of
Reeds, Rob Reed’s Sanctuary and Steven Wilson’s
Grace for Drowning. The group’s most recent
release is Berio’s Sinfonia with the BBC Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Josep Pons
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the US and in Abu Dhabi, Mexico and the
UK. He appears widely with the New York
Chamber Soloists. He has performed at many
festivals, including Seattle, Banff, Orford,
Ravinia, Tanglewood, Bard and Mostly Mozart.
He is the Artistic Director of Lyrica Chamber
Music, a community series in Morris County,
NJ which this year celebrates its 30th season.
Britten Sinfonia
Britten Sinfonia is one of the world’s most
celebrated and pioneering ensembles.
The orchestra is acclaimed for its virtuoso
musicianship, an approach to concert
programming which makes bold, intelligent
connections across 400 years of repertoire, and
great versatility. Rather than having a principal
conductor or director, it instead collaborates with
a range of the finest international guest artists
from across the musical spectrum.
Britten Sinfonia is an Associate Ensemble here at
the Barbican and has residencies across the east
of England in Norwich, Cambridge (where it is
an Ensemble-in-Residence at the University) and
Saffron Walden, where the orchestra recently
became Resident Orchestra at Saffron Hall. The
orchestra also performs a chamber music series
at the Wigmore Hall and appears regularly at
major UK festivals, including Aldeburgh and the
BBC Proms. The orchestra’s growing international
profile includes regular touring to Europe and
North and South America. The orchestra made its
debut in China in May 2016.
Founded in 1992, the orchestra is inspired by
the ethos of Benjamin Britten through worldclass performances, illuminating and distinctive
programmes where old meets new, and a deep
commitment to bringing outstanding music to
both the world’s finest concert halls and the local
community. Britten Sinfonia is a BBC Radio 3
broadcast partner and regularly records for
Harmonia Mundi and Hyperion.
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This season it collaborates with artists including
Thomas Adès, Barbara Hannigan, Harry
Christophers, Mahan Esfahani, Mark Padmore,
Mark Stone and The Sixteen, with premieres from
composers including Gerald Barry, Steve Reich,
Sir James MacMillan, Mark-Anthony Turnage,
Francisco Coll and Timo Andres. Following UK
performances, many of these collaborations will
tour internationally.
Central to Britten Sinfonia’s artistic programmes
is a wide range of creative learning projects both
within schools and the community. This season
Britten Sinfonia Academy, its youth ensemble,
will perform on the Barbican stage in an evening
concert, as well as appearing in an ‘At Lunch’
concert. Britten Sinfonia also holds a composition
competition, OPUS, offering unpublished
composers the chance to receive a professional
commission.
It won Royal Philharmonic Society awards in 2007,
2009 and 2013. Its recordings have been Grammy
nominated and have received a Gramophone
Award and an ECHO/Klassik Award, and most
recently, the orchestra won a BBC Music Magazine
Award for its recording of MacMillan’s Oboe
Concerto.
Britten Sinfonia Academy
Britten Sinfonia Academy (BSA) is an exciting
and dynamic chamber orchestral training
opportunity for talented secondary-school
musicians from the east of England. Mirroring the
daring programming and artistic excellence of its
parent orchestra, BSA nurtures and challenges its
members developing the breadth and depth of
their musicality and abilities as cultural leaders.
Each season, BSA embarks on a series of intensive
courses exploring the elements for which Britten
Sinfonia is renowned. These encompass repertoire
spanning several centuries, from Bach to brand
new, chamber music, playing without a conductor,
working on new commissions and presenting
performances to new audiences. They also offer
the chance to perform in some of the UK’s leading
venues, including the Barbican Centre, Saffron
Hall, West Road in Cambridge and St Andrews
Hall in Norwich. Throughout the year members
coached by and play alongside Britten Sinfonia’s
professional players and have the opportunity to
work with some of the world’s great artists.
Violin 1
Thomas Gould
Beatrix Lovejoy
Katherine Shave
Violin 2
Nicola Goldscheider
Alexandra Caldon
Judith Kelly
Viola
Nicholas Bootiman
Bridget Carey
Cello
Caroline Dearnley
Ben Chappell
Double Bass
Roger Linley
Bass Clarinet
Stephen Williams
Flute/Piccolo
Emer McDonough
Sarah O’Flynn
Bassoon
Sarah Burnett
Rachel Simms
Oboe
Steven Hudson
Michael O’Donnell
Contrabassoon
Rachel Simms
Clarinet
Joy Farrall
Stephen Williams
E flat Clarinet
Joy Farrall
Horn
Alex Wide
Jonathan
Quaintrell-Evans
Matthew Gunner
Trombone
Byron Fulcher
Jonny Hollick
Tuba
Ben Thomson
About the performers
Britten Sinfonia
Percussion
Toby Kearney
Owen Gunnell
Tim Gunnell
Synthesizer
Mark Knoop
Trumpet
Paul Archibald
Heidi Bennett
Britten Sinfonia Academy
Viola
Aimee Lucas
Kilian Meissner
Cello
Tarek Eldin
Maya Kitay
Butterfly Paterson
Matthew Hilton
Double Bass
Eleanor Roberts
Robert Almqvist
Flute
Lydia Cochrane
Emma Holmes
Leila Hooton
Oboe
Katherine Farnden
Maddy Wood
Theo Letts
Clarinet
Oliver Pigram
Dominic O’Sullivan
Horn
Samuel Nutt
Trumpet
Jasper Eaglesfield
Edward Weedon
Ewan Parkin
Percussion
Gus Wallett
Synthesizer
Morgan Overton
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Violin
Katie Schutte
Harriet Taylor
Lucy Bett
Frances Patterson
Joseph Bailey
Alex Papp
Hannah Sirringhaus
Siân Ellis
Emma Harris
Alice Gardner
Catherine McCardel
Henrietta MacFarlane
Reich, Glass, Adams:
The Sounds that
Changed America
Celebrating three composers
who transformed how we hear the world
Read the interactive article at
barbican.org.uk/reichglassadams