THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: November 27, 2011
MUSIC REVIEW


Composer Lets the Birds Call the Tune


 By ZACHARY WOOLF 

As the composer John Luther Adams once said of his work in an interview, "It began with birds." The earliest piece in what Mr. Adams calls his active catalog is "songbirdsongs," written from 1974 to 1980. In nine movements lasting just under an hour it places the listener in the middle of the natural world, the controlled chaos of birds, water and wind.


Mr. Adams's music - much of it inspired by the landscape of Alaska, where he has lived since the 1970s - has been programmed with increasing frequency in New York, including not one but two performances of his monumental percussion work "Inuksuit" this year. But it seems that "songbirdsongs" had never been performed in the city before Saturday afternoon, when the young ensemble Le Train Bleu, formed by the conductor and flutist Ransom Wilson, played it in an expanded version for six piccolo players and five percussionists at Galapagos Art Space.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The conductor and flutist Ransom Wilson, left, and Tara Helen O'Connor, right, performing in John Luther Adams's "songbirdsongs" at Galapagos Art Space backed by scenes of nature.
With the players arranged throughout the hall, it was a strange, thrilling immersive experience. There isn't a clear narrative to the piece, but there are scenes that sound somehow familiar: a nocturnal episode in which the sharp, bright birdcalls mellow into owl hoots; a terrifying scherzo that could be a storm or a hunt; a shimmering finale sunrise (or sunset).



Mr. Adams was influenced by Minimalism, and individual players in "songbirdsongs" often have a small riff, or cell - a birdcall, a rustle of leaves - that they repeat throughout a movement. But there is never a sense of stasis; the relationship among the different cells is constantly changing. Even in his earliest work Mr. Adams had an instinctive sense of the way music builds and breathes.

On Saturday at Galapagos the projections that accompanied the performance - conventionally idyllic scenes like a sunny meadow and a fog-laden forest - didn't convey the range and disorientations of Mr. Adams's vision. Though often meditative and peaceful, "songbirdsongs" is also violent and weird. It's nothing close to a Hallmark card.







Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The conductor and flutist Ransom Wilson, left, and Tara Helen O'Connor, right, performing in John Luther Adams's "songbirdsongs" at Galapagos Art Space backed by scenes of nature.

Le Train Bleu's gorgeous performance was most vivid when you closed your eyes. Then the music would vibrate and glitter around you, with the bewildering but satisfying precision of a dream.  It's not surprising that when Mr. Adams was once asked to name his five "desert island discs," he complied but then added: "I imagine the most absorbing music for me would be the music of the desert island itself. The strange and wonderful bird songs and animal calls, the music of the wind, the rain, the waves."

A version of this review appeared in print on November 28, 2011, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Composer Lets the Birds Call the Tune.