Adams and (Shudder) Orff at SFS

David Robertson, John Adams, and Víkingur Ólafsson

Davies Symphony Hall

January 16, 2025

Photo: Brandon Patoc, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

I reviewed San Francisco Symphony, with David Robertson conducting, in the world premiere of John Adams's beautiful new piano concerto, After the Fall, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Yes, believe me, I had questions about the pairing, which I suppose I could have directed to SFS, but I had no particular hope of getting an honest answer about this pairing. When you've got David Robertson on board, why would you program Carmina to go with an Adams premiere? This was the ninth Adams premiere that SFS has performed and I'd be surprised if they haven't performed all of his major works. The last big local premiere was Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, with Ólafsson and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Were there a lot of empty seats? I do recall a number of performances in 2021-22 and since then with shockingly low attendence.

I did discover that it wasn't the first time Robertson conducted the thing with SFS. I wasn't at that performance, because singing Carmina once, when I was in graduate school, and hearing an amateur chorus sing it once, were more than enough for me. It is admittedly much more impressive with the 125-voice SF Symphony Chorus and SFS itself than when performed with two pianos and percussion, but "impressive" is not the same as "good." Robertson is a terrific conductor and I'm sure that he made Carmina sound about as good as it can sound, but hey - he's done great Messiaen and great Carter here, so why ask him to do Carmina again?

Media round-up:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle, writes beautifully about After the Fall and then savages the Orff. He calls the Adams "spectacularly beautiful and ingratiating," then goes on to question the programming decision that put Carmina on the same program. In addition, he says that "Carmina burana taints everything it touches. It’s a ghastly piece of music — repetitive, simple-minded, and resolutely scornful of anything approaching harmonic or contrapuntal substance. We could bring in the piece’s other sins as well, including its fraught history with the Nazi regime and its pilferings from Stravinsky’s Les Noces." 100%, as they say on social media.
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV and SF Chronicle. Note that I could not squeeze in that the harp parts look beautiful, but I could not hear them very well from my seats at the dress rehearsal and first performance. A friend seated closer and in the center of Davies reports that she could hear them loud and clear at the Saturday performance.
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio. "After the Fall came across as little more than a weak shadow of what Adams had been doing some forty-odd years ago."
• DB at Kalimac's Corner. "Led by guest conductor David Robertson, this was a pretty dull run-through if you've heard Carmina as often as I have." And he liked After the Fall better than Must the Devil Have all the Good Tunes?
• Previously: Media round-up for Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

On Blue Sky Social, Michael Good had the following to say:

Here's my take on Carmina Burana, in stark contrast to @joshuakosman.bsky.social and @lisairontongue.bsky.social. It's a visionary piece that anticipates rock and roll by nearly 20 years. It elevates rhythm, melody, lyrics, and repetition over harmonic complexity. Its popularity is well deserved.

If what we're looking for is elevating rhythm, melody, lyrics, and repetition over harmonic complexity, let me mention the works of one Igor Stravinsky, who did all of that between 1913 and 1923, long before Orff, in Le Sacre du Printemps and Les Noces, and, not incidentally, did it all much, much better than Orff. Okay, Stravinsky is much more harmonically complex than Orff, but I'm sure you get the point I'm making here.