Berkeley Symphony's Gorgeous Finale
Nagano leads tour of Adams' moods
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Friday, February 2, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/02/DD45576.DTL

The epithet "Berkeley composer" gets appended so reflexively to John Adams' name that it's only natural to start wondering how much sense of place there actually is in his music.

Wednesday night's concert by Kent Nagano and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra made a halfhearted stab at giving Adams' work some geographical context. But that theme, suggested by Nagano in some spoken remarks from the stage of Zellerbach Hall, paled next to the chance to hear two of the composer's finer orchestral works in clear, vivid readings.

"El Dorado," Adams' dark, probing meditation on the arrival of the Spanish in America, does grow out of some awareness of California history. With its hints of American Indian sounds and its depiction of the clash between the Old and New Worlds, this score boasts a certain degree of local content.

The clarinet concerto "Gnarly Buttons," by contrast, harks back primarily to Adams' New England roots, with an occasional tip of the hat to the Londoners who originally played the work.

Still, both pieces proved infinitely superior to the evening's one genuine travelogue, "Berkeley Images" by French composer Jean-Pascal Beintus. And not even the charming and smooth-spoken Nagano could make a convincing case for including Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" among the Berkeley connection.

Yet if the evening's putative theme turned up threadbare -- as such themes often do -- the musical rewards, at least in the Adams pieces, were profound.

Certainly Nagano, who just led the first performances of the nativity oratorio "El Nino" in Paris and San Francisco, has a knack for delivering Adams' brand of crisp-edged lyricism. With his clear beat and fluid phrasing, he captures both the rhythmic propulsiveness and emotional freedom of this music.

"El Dorado," written in 1991 for a commission from the San Francisco Symphony but rarely performed since then, sends Adams' quasi-minimalist repetitions and orchestral bravura in a moody direction.

The piece is a broad diptych whose panels represent the coming of the Spaniards followed by a portrait of an imagined pre-Columbian Eden. Of the two sections, the first -- in which huge brass-driven chords manage to quash the simpler strains of the opening -- is certainly more exciting (the drama always quickens the pulse better than the pastoral).

But the serenely static second half, with its glittery scales running in place over tectonic bass lines, stays more stubbornly in the memory. The entire work got a brilliant reading by the orchestra.

"Gnarly Buttons," on the other hand, is pure and simple fun, from the hymn tune that gets bounced around, funhouse style, through the first movement, to the hilarious middle movement, whose deadpan rhythmic displacements make it one of Adams' funniest creations.

Only the slow finale, a gorgeous, long-breathed aria over simple repeated chords, varies the mood of exuberant high jinks. Michael Whight was the dexterous soloist, his playing bright and lissome.

The evening's other soloist was guitarist Manuel Barrueco, who was at his best only intermittently in Rodrigo's familiar showpiece. In the first movement especially, soloist and orchestra seemed to have trouble staying in synch, and Barrueco's playing alternated between passages of luminous precision and others that sounded uncertain.

The strongest moments came in the central slow movement, launched in style by English hornist Bennie Cottone and delivered by Barrueco with plenty of expressive panache.

The evening began with the world premiere of Beintus' impossibly sentimental slide show (the piece is based on the work of photographer Margaretta Mitchell). It proved to be a 17-minute hodgepodge of schmaltzy melodies and cloying waltzes, with big stretches lifted from Debussy, Prokofiev and a thousand daytime television soundtracks.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle