John Adams: My Father Knew Charles Ives / Harmonielehre
Naxos American Classics

No contemporary composer's works reflect a stronger Ives influence than those of John Adams. His long-standing affection for the New England maverick's music was indicated by the inclusion of The Unanswered Question and Five Songs on Adams' American Elegies (1991), and traces of Ives' influence can certainly be found elsewhere in Adams' output. The influence is directly acknowledged in My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003), even if the title does so obliquely; there's nothing coy about the musical connection, however, with the three-part work so Ivesian it registers as an undeniable homage. On this fine recording, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra give sterling, commendable readings of it and Harmonielehre (1985), the latter a watershed moment in the composer's development.

Adams is his usual mischievous self in the 2003 work, and not just musically. He admits that his father never, in fact, met Ives nor knew him personally, though Adams does identify parallels between his father and Charles's, Connecticut bandmaster George Ives. More importantly, Adams has characterized the work as “a piece of musical autobiography, an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge.” The key word, of course, is autobiography: My Father Knew Charles Ives is ultimately more a revealing portrait of Adams than it is Ives. As noted by Frank K. DeWald in liner notes, the work's creation followed On the Transmigration of Souls, the work written in 2002 to commemorate the victims of 9/11 and for which Adams drew upon Ives' so-called “mixing board” technique. That latter quality emerges even more forcefully in My Father Knew Charles Ives in its dense weaving of melodic patterns and timbres.

The autobiographical dimension is evident in the very title of the opening movement, Concord being the name of Adams' New Hampshire hometown. The setting's evoked vividly, with instruments suggesting the awakening of a bucolic summer morning and a solo trumpet's intoning a seeming nod to Ives in calling to mind the similarly searching trumpet in The Unanswered Question. Tremulous strings, tinkling percussion, and woodwinds intensify the dreamlike vision before a sudden increase in volume and activity intimates the arrival of a parade, with all the bluster and rambunction it entails. Adams' description of the central movement, “The Lake,” as a “summer nocturne” is borne out by its serene mood, the pastoral haze evoked by the oboe's pitch-bended figures, and the generally iridescent quality of the sound design. Solo trumpet returns for the concluding movement, “The Mountain,” the horn's querying again making the Ives connection explicit. Significantly, though, as the movement progresses, it becomes more Adams than Ives, almost as if it were purposefully written to show influence extends only so far. The pulsing rhythms that gradually surface, for example, are pure Adams, and so too are the surging patterns that coalesce into a daunting, monolithic mass.

The creation of Harmonielehre came at a critical time in Adams' life. Wryly calling himself “a Minimalist who is bored with Minimalism” after completing Harmonium in 1981, Adams spent nearly a year struggling to find a way to move beyond the genre with which his name had already become associated. Part of the difficulty involved his desire to push forward without abandoning the rich harmonic resources of the past. The floodgates did eventually open, with the writing of Harmonielehre coming in a three-month burst. As discernible as contrasts in mood and dynamics are in My Father Knew Charles Ives, they're more pronounced in Harmonielehre. The aggressiveness and vibrancy of the framing movements feel far removed from the angst-ridden adagio at the centre. Symphonic in scope, the three-movement piece isn't a pastiche, but there are passages that suggest the influence of Mahler and Sibelius and parts where allusions to Nixon in China are also audible.

Harmonielehre begins with the relentless hammering of E-minor chords, their repetitive delivery indicating a clear tie to Minimalism. Pulsing flurries of patterns perpetuate that connection, but the material smartly advances beyond that dimension into other sequences, including a strings-heavy Romantic passage and a quietly ecstatic peak that arrives a dozen minutes along. It's during these parts that Adams' music evidences an austerity less present in later works. With its A-B-A structure, the opening movement plays like a single-movement symphony, especially when the wide-ranging odyssey ends with the return of the pounding chords. Brooding pervades “The Anfortas Wound," also notable for severing ties to Minimalism. Here we witness a patient, organic unfolding that is anything but systems-based, and the material more than lives up to the composer's billing of it as “a piece about sickness and infirmity, physical and spiritual.” There's yearning too, particularly in the plaintive trumpet solo that precedes a series of climactic convulsions, and a stirring strings portamento at 9:34 that would sound right at home in Mahler's Ninth. The darkness lifts for the sunny “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie” (the former referencing a thirteenth-century mystic, the latter the nickname of Adams' then four-month-old daughter), its radiant pulsing welcome after the oppressive gloom of the central part. As languorous as it initially is, the final movement slowly picks up steam until competing tonalities culminate in a glorious E-flat major resolution.

February 2021