For almost 40 years John Luther Adams’ music was inspired by the landscapes and seascapes of Alaska. He first visited in 1975 and settled there three years later. As well as playing and composing, Adams worked in environmental protection, and the images from the natural world surrounding him – and his fears for its future – found their way into his music. And it was with one of those scores, the majestic orchestral Become Ocean, which won the Pulitzer prize for music in 2014, that Adams gained international recognition and established himself as a unique voice in American music.
But Become Ocean signalled the end of the Alaskan phase of Adams’ music. Since 2014 he has divided his time between New York and the Sonoran desert, and it is the landscapes of his new home in Mexico that are starting point for Become Desert, which completes a trilogy that Adams began with Become River for chamber orchestra in 2010. Like Become Ocean, it was composed for Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony, who gave the first performance last year. It is, he says, “both a celebration of the deserts we are given and a lamentation of the deserts we create”.
Where its predecessor evokes the unstoppable energy of the ocean, creating a slowly accumulating arc of sound that’s sometimes joyous, sometimes apocalyptic, Become Desert is more static and seamless, not so elemental. It’s woven from luminous textures that seem to be illuminated and transformed from within but which, despite the huge climaxes they generate, often feel as if they could evaporate at any moment. This is a very different orchestral journey from Adams’s previous masterpiece, but one that’s just as rewarding in this superb, beautifully recorded performance.
Also out this week
Performing the music of Harry Partch on the instruments he invented is always challenging, and Bridge’s series dedicated to that has been appearing slowly since it launched seven years ago. The latest volume, Sonata Dementia, performed by the eponymous ensemble Partch, is just the third. The work that gives the album its title, recorded for the first time, was Partch’s earliest abstract instrumental composition, a sextet using the 43-step musical scale he had devised, though it was left as a set of sketches and not intended for public performance. The rest of this impressively played album is perhaps more interesting, including the 12 Intrusions from 1950, and Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World, for trumpet, bass and boobams, which Partch composed in 1962 for Chet Baker, though the jazz trumpeter never performed it.
