If modern mainstream American academic music can seem like a never ending series of footnotes on Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, then the work of John Adams are footnotes upon those footnotes; less music than it is aural commentary on the original accomplishments of more talented predecessors; descending further into the same, exhausted ready-made gestures that may have amused long ago, but now decades later seem embarrassingly twee.
Philipp Gershkovich infamously called Dmitri Shostakovich “a hack in a trance.” Had he lived long enough to hear Adams’ blowzy Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, the former pupil of Anton Webern would have found a more fitting target for his ire.
Composed for Yuja Wang, who premiered the work in Disney Hall last year (and from where this “live” recording was patched together), the work is a three-movement concerto of the usual Adams twitch-and-shout; awkwardly subsuming reminiscences of others’ music within a basic framework of kitsch nostalgia.
Although the opening movement is marked “Gritty, Funky,” the music is—white boy appropriation of black urban slang from half a century ago notwithstanding—anything but. It ambles about smiling wanly, goaded forward by involuntary rhythmic tics, perhaps geriatric in inspiration. It is minimalism for bluehairs, Liberace for intellectual posers. Pastiches of Bartókian “night music” (shades of the Hungarian’s Piano Concerto No. 2) in the central slow movement give way to the “Obsession/Swing” finale. Those familiar with the composer’s Century Rolls, Chamber Symphony, and Naïve and Sentimental Music (or Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto and Capriccio, for that matter) will have heard it all before.
Sound as per usual from DG’s recent live recordings tends to be diffuse, yet spotlit (take a listen to the cello riff at the opening). Long on surface, short on substance, the music is tailored well to Wang’s glitzy style, who bangs away as compellingly as the composer presumably hoped. Her performance of Adams’ early China Gates—Terry Riley for yuppies—is fine. Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have a solid grasp of the work, but their palpable sense of eking through the score one measure at a time suggests they have yet to fully embrace this music.
Speaking of “Mr. Showmanship,” the underrated composer Michael Daugherty accomplished a quarter century ago in his Le Tombeau de Liberace what eluded Adams here: An ironic pop-flavored tribute/eulogy to “plastic fantastic” postwar culture. Adams’ concerto hardly approaches the brittle wit and transient moments of genuine pathos (to say nothing of originality) of Daugherty’s superior score.
For those seeking a musical equivalent to the egomaniacal, navel-gazing, grand-standing bien pensant smarminess of a Shepard Fairey or Noah Baumbach look no further. Admirers of serious new music, however, would do better to seek Daugherty’s concerto instead.
Why must Adams have all the good commissions?