John Adams: Absolute Jest / Grand Pianola Music

John Adams’s Absolute Jest takes its cue from Beethoven, specifically, fragments of the composer’s late string quartets, particularly the scherzos, which Adams reworks and recombines into a large-scale concertante piece for string quartet and orchestra. Commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for the orchestra’s centennial season, it received its premiere in 2012 and was subsequently revised before this recording, made with the orchestra that commissioned it under Michael Tilson Thomas, its music director at the time.

The disc pairs Absolute Jest with Grand Pianola Music, a considerably earlier Adams work from 1982, also written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony. Scored for two solo pianos, orchestra and three amplified female voices, it is one of Adams’s most overtly minimalist scores, built on cycling harmonic patterns that build toward the deliberately maximalist brass-and-piano climax that gives the piece its title. Adams himself conducts this half of the disc, with pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Orli Shaham taking the two solo parts and the vocal ensemble Synergy Vocals providing the wordless vocal lines.

About the performers

The St. Lawrence String Quartet, based at Stanford University, gives the solo quartet part in Absolute Jest, a piece that asks a great deal of its quartet, since Adams treats the four players as genuine soloists threaded through the orchestral texture rather than a decorative addition to it. Marc-André Hamelin, a Canadian pianist known equally for his interpretive range and his formidable technique, and Orli Shaham, an American pianist with an extensive concerto and chamber-music career, take the two-piano writing in Grand Pianola Music, a score that requires exactly the kind of rhythmic precision and stamina both pianists have built careers on.

A note on this page

No independent mmmusic critic review of this recording survived in any archive we could recover, the original page carried only the label’s own recording summary rather than an in-house review. Rather than guess at what might have been written, the text above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording, the commission history behind both works, and the performers involved.