After studying composition 
at Harvard, John Adams left 
the world of the “eastern 
establishment” for the 
liberated environs of the West Coast. 
He arrived in California in 1971 and has 
been based in the Bay Area ever since. 
An early fascination with minimalism 
eroded such that after a decade he 
described himself as “a minimalist who 
is bored with minimalism.” Through 
the years his output has become too 
variegated to pigeon-hole, including 
widely acclaimed works that confront 
social issues and international affairs, 
conflate popular and classical styles, 
and intermix “high” and “low” esthetics.

He has been honored with a 
raft of prestigious awards, among 
them the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for 
Music (for his orchestral work On the 
Transmigration of Souls), the 1995 
Grawemeyer Award (for his Violin 
Concerto), and the 2019 Erasmus Prize, 
awarded by King Willem-Alexander 
of the Netherlands “for notable 
contributions to European culture,” the 
only American composer so honored 
in that prize’s history.

“The Rock You Stand On,” he 
writes, “was composed as a gift to 
Marin Alsop, a close friend, a deeply 
intuitive musician and a longtime 
enthusiast for my music. She is one 
of the very few conductors whom 
I can trust to do the right thing 
with what I’ve written. ... The piece 
is a 10-minute essay in powerful, 
pulsating rhythms that begin as 
individual strokes and morph into 
rocking syncopations passed from one 
section of the orchestra to another. 
There is a certain ‘big band’ quality 
to the ensemble writing with the full 
orchestra at times executing irregular, 
bouncing figurations that are driven 
by an underlying jazz-inflected pulse. 
The title ... is not meant to suggest 
anything other than perhaps hinting at 
the qualities—loyalty, determination, 
devotion—that make Marin Alsop so 
very special to me.”

© James M. Keller

Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, 
composed in 1902-04 and revised 
in 1905, thrust the composer into 
an unaccustomed genre. Already 
in his first two symphonies and his 
Lemminkäinen tone poems he had 
defined his signature sound, dark and 
sober, which would not automatically 
meld with the extroverted, even flashy 
tradition of many 19th-century violin 
concertos. His Violin Concerto towers 
as an icy summit in the instrument’s 
literature. He was not natively drawn 
to composing concertos at all, and this 
was the only one, for any instrument, 
that he would see to fruition. He 
worked on a second violin concerto 
in 1915 but abandoned it far from 
completion, recycling his sketches into 
his Sixth Symphony.

The section of a traditional 
concerto most at odds with Sibelius’ 
predilection for profundity would be 
the first-movement cadenza, where 
soloists usually demonstrate dazzling 
technical prowess. Sibelius meets the 
challenge head-on: he provides a solo 
cadenza but instead of presenting it as 
a pendant to the proceedings he gives 
it immense structural importance 
by moving it to the middle of the 
movement and inviting it to fill the role 
of a development section. Also nontraditional is the lack of real dialogue 
in this concerto, the sort of back-andforth conversation between soloist 
and orchestra that we are accustomed 
to hearing in the concertos of, say, 
Beethoven or Brahms.

The vast breadth of the opening 
movement is mirrored in the still 
beauty of the slow movement, 
melancholy in a way that perhaps 
recalls Tchaikovsky. Although this 
concerto is not a prime example of 
Sibelius’ occasional penchant for folk 
inspiration, the finale does seem to 
be a dance of some sort. The musical 
commentator Donald Francis Tovey 
called it “a polonaise for polar bears,” 
a description so perfect that few 
commentators can resist quoting it.

© James M. Keller

Today everybody would agree 
that Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is 
one of the finest ballet scores of all 
time, but that was not the general 
consensus at the outset of its history. 
How puzzling it is to be reminded 
that the dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet, 
preparing for a Russian premiere 
that would be repeatedly delayed, 
complained bitterly about Prokofiev’s 
score, dismissing it as “undanceable”!

It was a joint project of Prokofiev 
and Sergei Radlov, a director noted 
for his daring modernist productions, 
including, in 1934, a Russian staging 
of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s 
play about Romeo Montague and 
Juliet Capulet, the idealistic young 
lovers whose passion is doomed by 
their feuding families. In their original 
scenario, Prokofiev and Radlov made 
a major change to Shakespeare’s plot: 
they arranged for Romeo to arrive 
just before Juliet ingests poison, with 
the result that the young lovers do 
not die but rather live happily ever 
after—a twist that should have met 
with pleasure from the Soviet cultural 
authorities, who liked nothing more 
than optimism. “There was quite 
a fuss about our attempt to give 
Romeo and Juliet a happy ending,” 
the composer later recalled. “The 
reason for this bit of barbarism was 
purely choreographic: the living can 
dance, the dying cannot.” It was a fair 
argument, but Prokofiev and Radlov 
eventually decided against it. “What 
really caused me to change my mind 
about the whole thing,” Prokofiev 
explained, “was a remark someone 
made to me. ‘Your music does not 
express real joy at the end.’ That was 
quite true. After several conferences 
with the choreographer, it was found 
that the tragic ending could be 
expressed in dance after all, and in 
due course the music for that ending 
was written.

© James M. Keller