Mixed reviews for Grand Pianola Music Prom

Following a fantastic week at the BBC Proms for wind, brass and percussion fans, last Sunday’s London Sinfonietta concert has received some mixed reviews.

The concert featured John Adam’s controversial work for wind, brass and percussion, Grand Pianola Music, as well as music by Antheil, Bartok and Stravinsky.

The Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson wrote, “[…]The highlight was John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music. This is a massively difficult piece to pull off in live performance, so it made sense to give it to the London Sinfonietta, in which every musician is a virtuoso. The conductor, Edward Gardner, brought out the surprising influences in the score: big-country American bombast à la Copland, and a cool stream of piano accompaniment (from John Constable and Rolf Hind) running underneath the orchestra, reminiscent of Saint-Saëns.

A work to win over anti-minimalists. But best not to read the droolingly sycophantic programme note, praising its “Lisztian panache” and countless other felicities. The author? One John Adams.” [The programme note can be found on the BBC Proms website]

Writing in the London Evening Standard, Barry Millington was less impressed: “[…]John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, played in the London Sinfonietta’s evening concert under Edward Gardner, was the piece that controversially opened the door in 1982 to such postmodernist artlessness. Arguably a landmark in the early Eighties for those weary of modernism, Grand Pianola Music now sounds more than ever like the apotheosis of banality.[…]”

Tim Ashley, writing for The Guardian, was unimpressed by the concert as a whole, but enjoyed the Adams: “[…]The high point was Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, ravishingly played by Constable and Rolf Hind, and with Gardner finely attuned to its ambivalent amalgam of transcendentalist rapture and banality.”

Perhaps the most detailed review currently available though comes from Stephen Graham at www.musicalcriticism.com. In a thoughtful and balanced piece, he writes of the Adams, “[…]The longest piece of the night had been John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music. Starting out more like John Luther Adams (in its teeming, fluorescent ambience) than John Adams, the work contains some unmistakably Reichian gestures (particularly the alternated sustained and staccato wordless voices, sung with precision and great expression by three female members of Synergy Vocals). The scoring and indeed the expression are more lush and eclectic than Reich though; the horn sonorities amidst luscious chords, and the tuba solos in the second section, for instance, both signal Adam’s neo-romantic preferences. The performance, despite some initially unsteady rhythms from the otherwise assured soloists Rolf Hind and John Constable, was utterly vivid. The calm sureness of the writing, so unassuming but yet also so communicative, came across luminously. The madly ironic I-V-I progression and the unguarded textures of the finale suggested Abba’s Arrival, amongst many other things, as a cousin in sound, and if a contemporary work can get away with something like that then it has to be, in my book, a good thing. The wonderful brio of the following melody, and the build towards the climax, were much more Adamsian (if I can use that term).”

You can add your own reviews at the BBC Proms website, and don’t forget that you can listen to the concert via the BBC iPlayer for the next five days.

Some interesting thoughts from the composer about Grand Pianola Music: