Naive & Sentimental Music | John Adams, David Tanenbaum, ...

Naive & Sentimental Music | John Adams, David Tanenbaum, ... | No Masterpiece, But Good Stuff

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Naive & Sentimenta...

	Naive & Sentimental Music John Adams, David Tanenbaum, ... Nonesuch, 2002 average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The album is 48-minutes of Adams most ambitious symphonic work to date performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Nonesuch Records. Slipcase. 2002.

Postmodern Polyphony

Reading this bunch of intelligent reviews for John Adam's work is a great experience. No one seems to be bored by this score and the music intonates lots of different feelings.

Personally I find this music a masterpiece. Not because of all the obvious skill displayed from composer and performers alike. Nor because (as most agree) the orchestration is perfect.

What I think the core of this artistic achievement is John Adams ability capture the Zeitgeist of 1999. It is as if the optimism, all the hype and drive of the 1990s found its way into his score. This is very much music for a certain place at a certain point in history.

Adams also turns this upside down when melancholy and irony takes over in the last movement. There is a ambivalence at play not heard in many film scores (nor in most music at all).
The analogy with Mahler is obvious - a classical composers takes the simple and perhaps sentimental pop idiom then turns it into monument of his time.
John Adams is - I think - the better composer, but the fate of his music (and its critics) will be very similar indeed.

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No Masterpiece, But Good Stuff

Naive and Sentimental Music is not the masterpiece that Harmonielehre is. Although they employ similar orchestral forces and have similar compositional structures, the former doesn't reach the kind of tension or exuberance that the latter achieves. Nevertheless, there's also a lot of beautiful music here, and if you're a fan of John Adams you will probably find this piece worthwhile.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Tracks
Naive and Sentimental Music | Mother of the Man | Chain to the Rhythm

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