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4.0 out of 5 stars
2 major choral works based on famous literary texts., April 2 2002
John Adams' 'Harmonium' famously opens with a gathering choral wave of 'No no no', before gushing into an eddying (to these ears, over-written) setting of John Donne's 'Negative Love'. Adams opts to emphasise the poems's bravura, rather than its, er, negativity, with Philip Glass-like repetitive swirls, punctuated by brass. The two Emily Dickinson settings are much more satisfying. 'When I could Not Stop For Death' drags to a funereal creep, the poem's carriage-ride from death grinding down to a final nothingness. Out of the sustained void, however, emerges the work's most entrancing effect, an initially faint, but snowballing sound, like a rush of blood to a corpse, rising to a streaming, orgasmic fanfare, and Dickinson's 'Wild Nights'. But even this hysterical energy must expend itself, and the ironic, Copland-like brass returns the piece to its mood of funeral.The conflation of love and death was an obsession of Edgar Allen Poe's, whose poem 'The Bells' (translated by a minor Russian symbolist, retranslated here) was reworked by Rachmaninoff, in the most immediate and appealing of the two choral works on offer. The jubilant first movement, signifying birth, will shock any one who had the writer down as a morbid depressive, with its 'wave of tuneful rapture'. Part Two continues the optimism, its sleepy, voluptuous satiety channeled through Renee Fleming's treacly solo. Part Three, however, is a very Russian inferno (at times recalling Mussorgsky), riven with terror, panic and death, the chorus representing both fire, with a possessed tumult, and the alarm bells shrieking help. Part Four sees the bells ringing a 'stern monody', the music creating a mood in which 'glad endeavour quenched for ever in the silence and the gloom', the stateliness burst by the intrusion of a gibbering fiend. The rich melodic line from Part One that indicted rejoicing now validates the supremancy of the tomb, completing a bleak full circle, but also, perhaps, releasing this section's despair into rest. Rachmaninoff's orchestral writing is more extensive and colourful than Adams' deliberately restricted monotone...
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