Hahn, SF Symphony, NCH, Dublin: John Adams's My Father Knew Charles Ives is a new piece, so new in fact that Thursday's NCH performance by the San Francisco Symphony was the European première, preceded only by the world première given in San Francisco eight days earlier.
The three-movement work – the movements are "Concord ", "The Lake "and "The Mountain " –is an homage to Ives, America's first great original compositional voice, and there is also much in the music, particularly in the matching of gaits between different instrumental choirs, that evokes the practices of jazz musicians.
The piece will enchant anyone who likes to track down musical references, not only from Ives (the multi-layering, the marching bands and the trumpet from The Unanswered Question stand out), but also from Beethoven, a flicker of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and more. And the Concord of Adams's piece is not the Concord of Ives, but the town where Adams grew up. Taking his cue from one of Ives's most popular works, Adams has joked that his piece might as well be called Three Places in New England, Only a Little Further North.
The music also runs to nature evocations (and a foghorn), and often sounds as if it were written with a twinkle in the eye, especially as regards its rhythmic tickling of the senses.
Adams is a master at weaving intricate textures (those of the third movement are the ones which sound most typically Adams-ish), and much of the pleasure that's to be had in this piece comes from the shimmer and variegation of the surface. The basic material, as in many of this composer's works, has a curtailed expressive weight which, presumably intentionally, can sometimes seem tangential to its apparent gestural purpose. The San Francisco players under Tilson Thomas played the piece with finesse.
The young US violinist Hilary Hahn delivered Stravinsky's Violin Concerto as if the business of confronting the considerable challenges of this often angular neo-classical score were as simple as standing on stage and breathing.
No note or combination of notes seemed awkwardly placed for her, so that the rhythmic life of the music was captured with unusual integrity, and the passages of double-stopping could be shaped with remarkable independence of part-playing.
Her approach may have been light on charm, but the pleasure it offered was great – the pleasure of witnessing an impeccably musical conception given life with meticulous precision.
The audience's vociferous pleasure ensured an immediate encore, some solo Bach played with similar aplomb.
The final work in Thursday’s programme was the third of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral suites, a work in which the composer reveals the same technical delight in patterning as the opening Adams, and also some of the same characteristics of raw material.
Thomas treated it as a virtuoso orchestral showpiece, and the players captured the composer's flourishes and displays with colourful sharpness.
The orchestra's Wednesday programme was devoted to a single work, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and given a reading that was careful and correct but constricted – moments of inner uncertainty and pressure were prudently constrained. The joy here was in the marshalling of detail and sonority, which were of an order all too infrequently heard in Mahler performances in Dublin.
