In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”
And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.
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The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.
These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).
