Ravel: Alborada del gracioso; Debussy/arr. John Adams: Le Livre de Baudelaire; John Adams: “This is prophetic!” from Nixon in China and Frenzy (Canadian Première/TSO Co-commission). Toronto Symphony Orchestra, John Adams, conductor; soprano Anna Prohaska. Roy Thomson Hall, November 6, 2024. Repeats November 9; tickets here.
I can’t help but think that something more than coincidence was at work here, with the highly anticipated return of John Adams to Toronto Symphony on the evening after America’s big decision day.
The 77-year-old composer himself couldn’t resist drawing parallels between an excerpt from his breakthrough opera, Nixon in China, and the election results. “This is an opera for the Republicans and Communists,” he joked from the podium, and whether you like his music or not, Adams is undeniably charismatic and popular.
The audience in the surprisingly sparsely-filled Roy Thomson Hall were treated to all three faces of Adams: the conductor, the orchestrator, and of course the composer. The French-American programme opened with a burst of colours in Ravel’s orchestration of his own piano piece, Alborada del gracioso. There was plenty of bite in the opening pizzicato strings, and plenty of exhilaration thereafter, even if the triple-tonguing in trumpet and flute sometimes lacked clarity.
Debussy’s early settings of poems from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, made for an ideal companion to Ravel, especially in Adams’s lavish yet subtle orchestration, idiomatic à-la-Pelléas et Mélisande. Adams took four of the five songs for his homage, wrapping the voice in a cloud of sensuous orchestral colours, yet remaining sensitive to the limpid, transparent textures. Both the Wagnerian pathos of the songs and Adams’s voluptuous arrangement call for a soloist who can fully embody the music’s ecstatic raptures.
Despite her pleasant timbre and obvious sensitivity, the Austrian-English soprano, Anna Prohaska (one of this season’s spotlight artists) lacks vocal heft and often disappeared under the luxuriant wrappings of the orchestra. This was not helped by her bel canto-style legato, with exaggerated vowels and barely caressed consonances, which only further obscured Baudelaire’s words, while her strange arm-waving seemed to acknowledge the problem of communication without doing anything to solve it.
Prohaska’s appearance as Mrs Nixon in ‘This is prophetic!’ from Noxon in China did little to redeem her. In this self-standing aria from the opera, Mrs Nixon, who reportedly had no interest in politics during her and her husband’s visit to Beijing, is seized by visions and images, some trivial, some quasi-utopian, from lonely drivers pulling over for a bite to eat, to the Statue of Liberty changing a little (prophetic, perhaps, of recent GIFs of the Statue in tears at the election results?). With no real dramatic backbone or direction, the music’s banal minimalism and new-age text have not stood the test of time.
The concert closed with Adams’s latest composition, Frenzy, presumably intended as the main attraction of this compact concert. Dedicated to and premiered by Simon Rattle, this is a typical Adams score: skilfully-crafted, effective, energetic and accessible, yet without any dramatic tension or risk-taking. He calls it a “short symphony”, and if you squint enough, you might just be able to argue for such an optimistic label. But, as other critics have observed, it is really no more than a showpiece, at best, as the composer himself put it in his pre-performance address, “a spring-loaded” work.
The main theme, derived from Adams’ latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, is surrounded by rhythmic figures and patterns that mutate, combine, and develop in a perpetuum mobile painted in typically flashy orchestral colours. A master-manipulator, Adams throws in plenty of red-herring moments of deceptive calm, before coming to an unexpected halt. The Toronto Symphony stayed in control of what is clearly a complex score.
An enjoyable night, then, but one that lacked substance and left one wondering whether the unstoppable American will ever take pause and set his sights on true profundity.
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