Coiled Serpents

John Adams' Na�ve and Sentimental Music

Comments (0) By Alan Rich Wednesday, Jan 24 2007

A most distinguished concert, this — with the Messaien preceded, as was proper, by the Quartet of Claude Debussy. Two weeks ago I had deplored the tendency of Chamber Music Society audiences to applaud between movements, in this most fragile repertoire. This night, violinist Mitch Newman made a preconcert speech gently slapping the audience on its collective wrist. It worked.

Tree on the Move

Composer John Adams

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The splendid Jacaranda Concerts still wait out the completion of remodeling at their Santa Monica venue; last Sunday’s concert found activities transferred to the Cypress Recital Hall at Cal State Northridge. A big and loyal crowd had found its way. Five sets of fingers were involved in the kind of varied piano program that only a true music-loving connoisseur could concoct; that has been the peculiar magic of these concerts from their beginning. The room at Northridge was pleasant enough, as school auditoriums go. (CSUN soon breaks ground for a major performing arts center, to open in 2009.) But Jacaranda’s home base — Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian, with its elegant small organ and its intimate layout — is a special place, and it will be good to get back, on April 7.

The program was the usual Jacaranda assortment of varied pleasures. Any concert that includes Schubert’s F-minor Fantasy, the overpowering piano duet from his last year, which moves from plaintive outcry to its final fugue that ties you in knots, needs nothing more. Hearing this work as an undergrad had caused me to change my major from pre-med to music. Sixty years later, the playing of Gloria Cheng and Robert Edward Thies confirmed the soundness of my decision. Eduardo Delgado’s Piazzolla and Ginastera, Scott Dunn’s Copland and Ives and some Liszt transformed into high-caloric goo by Steven Vanhauwaert added to the afternoon’s absurdities and its high delights.