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Thomas - Adams: Absolute Jest, Grand Pianola Music (2015)

Posted By: peotuvave
Thomas - Adams: Absolute Jest, Grand Pianola Music (2015)

Thomas - Adams: Absolute Jest, Grand Pianola Music (2015)
EAC Rip | Flac (Tracks + cue + log) | 279 MB | MP3 320Kbps CBR | 175 MB | 1 CD | Full Scans
Genre: Classical | Label: San Francisco Symphony | Catalog Number: 63

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony offer the world-premiere recording of John Adams’ Absolute Jest, commissioned by the orchestra, alongside the composer’s Grand Pianola Music, another SFS commission from 30 years earlier, conducted here by the composer. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony join forces with America’s most-performed living composer, John Adams, in a colossal album featuring Adams’s Absolute Jest and Grand Pianola Music. Hear Adams’s inspired and witty take on Beethoven’s spirited scherzos in this first-ever recording of his SFS- commissioned Absolute Jest. Also featured is Grand Pianola Music, with its tongue-in-cheek allusions to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, written for and premiered by the SFS. Both works speak to the deeply personal and vital relationship of some of the top musicians of our time: John Adams, MTT, and the SFS.

Composer: John Adams
Performer: Orli Shaham, Marc-André Hamelin
Conductor: Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams
Orchestra/Ensemble: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Synergy Vocals

Reviews: A new John Adams piece this week, with the premiere recording of his 2013 work for string quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and St Lawrence String Quartet, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. Besides a handful of works by Schoenberg, Martinů, and a few others, there aren’t all that many pieces for this instrumental combination (Adams himself suggests that it’s “pretty much a repertory black hole”), partly because it's hard to balance the quartet against the full orchestra (Adams attempts to overcome this by asking that the string quartet be discreetly amplified in performance). On disc, of course, this is not so much of an issue, and I found that there was a pleasing presence to the solo string quartet without it seeming artificially loud.

It’s described as a “colossal twenty-five-minute scherzo”, and uses fragments of themes from various pieces by Beethoven, mainly the string quartets, opp. 131 and 135, and the Grosse Fuge. Although there is much more to the piece than just having a fun time playing Name that Tune, it is interesting to hear how he weaves the Beethoven snippets into the whole fabric. As well as the quartets, the first movement is infused with the famous dotted rhythm that begins not only the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony but also the Vivace of the first movement of the Seventh.

Adams has said that here the word jest indicates not so much a joke, but rather derives from the Latin word gesta, meaning a noble deed. So it’s not a comedy as such, although the piece as a whole fits very much into his cheeky, playful style. There were a few places in the first movement, particularly some of the dazzling woodwind writing, that reminded me of another of his pieces, Fearful Symmetries, and elsewhere some of the ascending horn lines seemed to hark back to an earlier, little-known work called El Dorado. Alongside some great orchestral playing, the St Lawrence String Quartet stand out as particularly impressive: the final Prestissimo movement sees a flurry of semiquavers, all despatched effortlessly, and they’re great at bringing out Adams’s often-quirkily angular melodic writing.

Also on the disc is a new recording of Grand Pianola Music, premiered by the San Francisco Symphony back in 1982, and here conducted by the composer. Apparently not terribly well received at its premiere (Adams notes that “the piece seems to have something to offend everybody”), it is now possibly one of his more popular works. Stylistically, it sounds to me, at least in the first movement with its long pulsating sequences over very slow-moving harmonies, much more like something by Steve Reich. In the two solo piano parts, Adams has talked about how he was trying to depict the idea of tape and digital delays, where a sound can be repeated in a fraction of a second. So, often the two pianists play essentially the same material but either a semiquaver or a quaver apart. This idea is aided immensely here by two pianists of the calibre of Marc-André Hamelin and Orli Shaham. The moment of arrival about ninety seconds into the final part (On the Dominant Divide), where the two pianos come crashing in with a cascade of arpeggios and broken chords, always makes me think of the opening of Beethoven's Emperor Piano Concerto, so it's apt that this should form the coupling for Absolute Jest.

Soon after comes the “big tune”, which in Adams's words was meant to be one that “seems like an oldie, the words for which no one can quite remember”. It's certainly annoyingly catchy (in a good way!) and leads the piece to a rousingly triumphant conclusion. It’s given a fantastic performance by all concerned, not least the wordless female vocal trio that Adams employs, and a terrifingly high but immaculately performed tuba solo in the slow movement. A great disc, then, for all Adams fans!

Tracklisting:

Absolute Jest
1. Beginning
2. Presto
3. Lo stesso tempo
4. Meno mosso
5. Vivacissimo
6. Prestissimo
St. Lawrence String Quartet
San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas
Grand Pianola Music
7. Part 1
8. Part 1 - Slow
9. Part 2, On the Dominant Divide

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 4 from 7. December 2014

EAC extraction logfile from 6. October 2015, 20:01

John Adams / Absolute Jest & Grand Pianola Music

Used drive : TSSTcorpDVDWBD TS-LB23A Adapter: 1 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
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Read offset correction : 6
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Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
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Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 128 kBit/s
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Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\Flac\flac.exe
Additional command line options : -T "COMMENT=Ripped by GFox" -V -8 %source%

TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
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1 | 0:00.00 | 10:35.73 | 0 | 47697
2 | 10:35.73 | 3:30.38 | 47698 | 63485
3 | 14:06.36 | 1:07.43 | 63486 | 68553
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9 | 48:51.25 | 8:47.43 | 219850 | 259417

Range status and errors

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Filename D:\Downloads\John Adams - Absolute Jest & Grand Pianola Music.wav

Peak level 100.0 %
Extraction speed 1.8 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 45CE3A20
Copy CRC 45CE3A20
Copy OK

No errors occurred

AccurateRip summary

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Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
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Track 5 not present in database
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None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

End of status report

==== Log checksum 2F4933BA8D4F7605D110228CAE1105FA7DBEEA8039AD7E74C512A4E072DDBDB6 ====



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