If anyone could make Beethoven’s majestic and, um, heroic “Eroica” symphony seems less so, it’s John Adams (well, I suppose Mahler could give it a try as well). This weekend, Edo de Waart nearly packed the Marcus Center’s Uihlein Hall with a program that combined Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony with Adams’ 1981 Harmonium, which was commissioned by de Waart (as music director of the San Francisco Symphony) and is dedicated to him.
Adams, whose expansive ideas brought minimalism out of the experimental recital room into the orchestra hall, has gone on to become one of the most visible living composers in art music today (his 1987 opera, Nixon in China, just made its long overdue debut at the Met). And Harmonium was his first work for a large orchestra, and his first major commission. It was natural that De Waart would bring it to his new home, and its power hasn’t diminished in the 30 years since the premiere.
The music seems almost too mercurial for de Waart’s temperate conducting style, but he, the orchestra and the MSO chorus had no problem capturing the dynamic thrill of Adams’ musical ideas. A setting of three poems (by John Donne and Emily Dickinson), the music takes its time between harmonic changes (a key characteristic of minimalism), but shifts in texture and tone as it moves form the calm to the ecstatic. There was nothing temperate about the raucous final movement, which captures the rapture of Dickinson’s “Wild Nights” with white hot fervor.
The huge ensemble needed for Harmonium made the orchestra seem tiny when it assembled for Beethoven’s “Eroica.” And de Waart seemed to treat it like a piece of chamber music. He took a quick tempo in the opening movement, emphasizing the dance-like quality of the waltz tempo and the humor of the syncopated hanging resolutions. The second movement was more deliberate, with the fugal passages seeming almost haltingly calculating. But he used the anticipation here to charge ahead into the cascading joy of the scherzo and the stop-start variations of the finale.
As if this wasn’t enough, de Waart opened the concert with an unsentimental but beautifully paced version of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
