Berkeley composerJohn Adams’recent piano concerto “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” gets under way in a fearless barrage and then never stops. It’s a nearly 30-minute powder keg of pounding keyboard harmonies, deliciously off-kilter rhythms and flat-out insolence. It sprints with a swagger.
Three years after its world premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “Must the Devil” entered the San Francisco Symphony’s repertoire on Thursday, June 23, in a powerhouse performance led by音乐总监Esa-Pekka Salonenand featuring a stunning debut by the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.
有其他奇妙的产品program in Davies Symphony Hall as well, by Sibelius and thelate Steven Stucky. But it’s hard to focus on those, at least for the moment, because Adams’ extraordinary score demands attention.
For starters, it’s rare to hear a piece of music crammed with so many notes. In the two outer movements, the solo piano part (originally written for the greatYuja Wang) consists almost entirely of chords — enormous fistfuls of notes banged out with breathless exuberance. It’s as if Franz Liszt and Jerry Lee Lewis had come to a meeting of the minds.
即使在协奏曲中心更轻松和宽敞的缓慢运动中，纹理也只有一点。有一个狂想曲的民谣和一场刺耳的小游行，但是无论节奏如何，独奏者都很少休息一下。演奏亚当斯的独奏音乐是一种锻炼。
This approach, in turn, makes demands on the listener as well. The music immediately sweeps you up from the opening passage, which establishes both the chordal language of the score and its magnificent metric profile (a craggy nine-beat pattern that both grooves and stutters). Cascades of full-orchestra writing wash over you in waves while the piano keeps crashing its way on top.
“Surely, we will all have a moment at some point to catch our breath,” you think. But no, breathing is for the faint of heart.
Adams adopted a similar maximalist approach in his1993 Violin Concerto, another piece that mounts a musical full-court press. But “Must the Devil” — whose soloist can produce up to 10 notes at a time rather just two or three — feels, if anything, even more exhilaratingly insistent. There’s a physicality about a grand piano, after all, that a violin simply can’t match.
If the piece were simply an athletic musical onslaught, that would be impressive only up to a point. As always, though, Adams channels the score’s physical effects through a battery of superbly calibrated harmonic choices, and teases out melodies of sometimes surprising delicacy from the mix. (The title, a remark attributed to the theologian Martin Luther, is a mildly surprising choice, since tunes are rarely at the foreground.)
The slow movement, at its heart, is like a cocktail-lounge take on Ravel, turning its harmonies this way and that, and catching reflections of light from a mirror ball. The finale, which emerges suavely and suddenly out of its predecessor (the concerto’s movements are played without a pause), builds on a funky, chugging bass line that owes a debt to both Stravinsky and James Brown.
Ólafsson proved to be a fearless soloist, dispatching the assignment with cool aplomb, and he returned for a gorgeous encore rendition of three Hungarian folk songs arranged by Bartók.
沙龙与“激进的光”，a sumptuous, still-voiced 2007 tone poem by Stucky that conjures up a shimmery color field punctuated by melodic tidbits from the woodwinds. Gradually, the intensity builds — there’s a hint of Monet’s seascapes in the brass writing — and the harmonies deepen until they disperse in the glorious final moments.
Salonen塑造了雄辩的阅读，并为Sibelius的第五交响曲的表演带来了类似的温柔和清晰度的结合，该节目占据了音乐会的下半场。这个节目终于是他担任乐团音乐总监的第一个完整赛季的结论，并使听众渴望对待即将发生的事情。
旧金山交响乐：7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, June 24-25. $20-$85. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000.www.sfsymphony.org