Meeting and hearing genius

What do you get if you put together a violin and a piano? That’s easy, a violin sonata. What if you add two basses, a marimba, a vibraphone and a second piano, and put a conductor in front of the lot?

Then you have John Luther Adams’s brilliant 2001 piece The Light That Fills the World, performed last night on the Banff Centre’s Music for a Summer Evening series. Ransom conducted; the performers were mostly students here for the Strings and Winds Master Class and Mr. Adams was in attendance. In fact Ransom and I had lunch with him earlier in the day, before my trip to Canmore. (They've worked together before; I was just meeting him).

It was an intense and wonderful concert. Student composer Jean-Sélim Abdelmoula’s Variations fantômes opened the program, with the composer at the keyboard. To my ear it was moody and rapturous, showcasing a composer with great promise.

Another student, Jared Miller, introduced his Bloom for solo cello and mixed flute ensemble. Miller told us the piece was inspired by a bicycle ride on which he came across hundreds of birds singing in the trees above him. It was a charming piece that clearly owed a debt to John Luther Adams's songbirdsongs; you may remember that Ransom did that more layered work a few years back with Le Train Bleu; you can read a review here. For last night's piece Ransom was center stage, facing the audience, conducting the cellist to his left and eight flutists who were scattered throughout the theatre’s aisles.

The rest of the evening belonged to Mr. Adams. We heard two solo piano pieces, Among Red Mountains and Nunataks (Solitary Peaks), both convincingly played by Tyler Wottrich, and an emotional, strange and wonderful string quartet, The Wind in High Places, sensitively rendered by the Rolston String Quartet. In introducing the quartet Adams had warned us it would likely not sound like any string quartet we had heard before, since the instruments would all be played open stringed -- that is, the players do not use their fingers to stop the strings. He was right, I had never heard a quartet like it, and I found it intense and plaintive and absolutely compelling.

The highlight of the evening was The Light That Fills the World. It sits on a timeline that leads to Adam’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning Become Ocean a piece that has changed my understanding of modern classical music and given me hours of joy over repeated listenings. If you don't know it -- or even if you do -- go, now, and listen to it here.

The Banff Centre has a history with John Luther Adams.  In 2009 he premiered Inuksuit, a piece for 9-99 percussionists, in an outdoor venue on this beautiful campus. On the Summer Solstice that year the rains came hard and heavy until, fifteen minutes before time to make the decision whether to cancel, the clouds parted, the sky lightened and the concert went forward. How I wish I had been here that day.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting John and I think I can say this about him: he will almost certainly never develop an ulcer, for he pours his emotions into his music, where they soothe and challenge and ennoble the listener. I can't wait to hear more.