A few years ago, during the Ojai Music Festival in California, the pianist Vikingur Olafsson was having a couple of beers with the composer John Adams when he said, “John, you know that you are going to write me a piano concerto, don’t you?”
Adams paused for several seconds, took a sip and responded, “I guess you’re right.”
“And that,” Olafsson said in an interview, “was that.” With a casual comment, one of today’s most intelligently expressive pianists brokered a deal with one of the world’s great composers. The resulting half-hour concerto, “After the Fall,” premieres on Thursday at the San Francisco Symphony.
San Francisco, near Adams’s home in Berkeley, is just the first stop on the piece’s tour: It has nine commissioners, from cities including Paris, London, Los Angeles and Vienna. Olafsson has also programmed “After the Fall” elsewhere, guaranteeing it broad exposure in the near future.
“It’s so meaningful to me as a composer,” Adams said, “that there are certain artists at the very top level like Vikingur who take a work, and they’re truly committed to it. If we’re going to have a future for our art, we need people to have that kind of passionate devotion to the work.”
Olafsson said he wasn’t motivated by a sense of duty to program “After the Fall.” He just loves Adams’s music, and wants to internalize it, the way he would a concerto by Mozart or Ravel.
“I want to have the sensation that you become the music when you play it, a little bit like an actor who becomes the role that they act,” he said. “But that just takes a lot of time.”
It helps that Olafsson is an inveterate performer of Adams’s earlier piano concertos, “Century Rolls” (1996), which was written for Emanuel Ax, and “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” (2018), written for Yuja Wang. Like those, “After the Fall” has a poetic yet evocative title. Adams, in a joint interview with Olafsson, discussed what inspired that name, and more details of the score. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What brought you two together?
JOHN ADAMS We met in Paris right before the pandemic shut everything down. “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” had been done, but I never feel that I’m really confident about my pieces until I’ve conducted them. I had heard about this fantastic Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olafsson, and we didn’t really know each other. But we did it in Paris, and we’ve since done it all over. That was the start of not only our collaboration, but a really wonderful friendship.
VIKINGUR OLAFSSON I’ve been listening to your music since I was like 13. My father is a composer and an architect, and has all this time during his workdays as he’s designing houses to listen to the best of new music. And so he basically brought me John’s music the same time I was discovering Stravinsky.
How does “After the Fall” differ in character from Adams’s other piano concertos?
OLAFSSON They share a common brilliance. “Century Rolls” I find to be a very joyful piece. I remember when I played that, I made a connection to Maurice Ravel, but I did not think about Ravel in “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” That is obviously a masterpiece, but a very dark piece, much more tense.
I did think of Ravel when I was looking at the score of this new concerto, in its sense of architecture and craftsmanship, and the joy in the detail. But there’s also this element in the third movement, which revolves around the visit of a certain Johann Sebastian.
It ends with a fantasia of sorts based on the C-minor Prelude from the first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
OLAFSSON It’s so convincing and different from anything I have ever played and anything I have ever heard. It feels a little bit like entering your home, but you’ve never been there before. The whole thing’s a strange paradox: You’re entering a place that feels very much like you recognize yourself in it, and it’s yours in a certain sense, but you’ve never been there before.
What is the story behind the title?
ADAMS There are a couple of quotes from Boulez’s “Music Lessons,” a huge tome of lectures he gave at the Collège de France. And he has a kind of dystopian description of the present, that in essence the avant-garde is exhausted. There are no more ideas, just going back and mining the past because there’s nothing fresh. I read that as a somewhat Miltonian scene, like the fall in the Garden of Eden.
At the same time, there’s a pun in the title because Sam, my son, had written a piano concerto, which was also premiered by San Francisco. It’s called “No Such Spring,” so there is just a little bit of an in-joke there.
≠But we’re working in a kind of post-avant-garde era, which I’ve been working in all my life, and we stop and ask ourselves about the relevance of what we’re doing, especially in a culture where pop music is so suffocatingly omnipresent and omnipotent. Are we living in a period after the fall, or is this really a period in which something very meaningful can be done with ideas that were first discovered two, three, four hundred years ago?
A composer like Busoni would say that the past must always inform the present.
ADAMS There was a David Hockney exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. One room affected me so strongly, and it wasn’t his painting. The room was covered from floor to ceiling with images that have meant something to him. It was everything: pictures of sculpture, photographs, travel magazines, paintings. And I realized that’s sort of where I’ve been all my life. I’ve found these signals that are meaningful, and many of them are familiar to listeners, but I’ve made a new language out of them.
How would you describe the shape of “After the Fall”?
OLAFSSON The score is extraordinarily refined, and at the same time energetic. It also feels so short. It feels like a 15-minute concerto, I think because of the slow movement, which is possibly my favorite. While it is slow, it is also extremely light. It has a lot of notes, actually, but it’s kind of balletic. Another reason, I think is the inner architecture of the piece, the counterpoint and the use of motives for structural building. In that sense, because you keep hearing familiar motives in new settings and harmonic contexts, it flies by.
The end of the piece has an abrupt climax, then a lingering, quietly ringing harp. What do you make of that?
ADAMS I keep a journal about my work, and it’s funny if I go back and read it because I always have a moment of exasperation trying to end a piece. I have pieces like “Harmonielehre,” where I end in a blazing major triad and the audience goes berserk. But that kind of ending, unless it’s ironic, doesn’t fit our zeitgeist. I can’t explain this ending. I probably need therapy to explain what happens.
OLAFSSON I think the only way to end a good conversation is with a question.
ADAMS That’s good. Thank you for explaining that.
OLAFSSON My first thought was that he’s just sent Bach into outer space. That was my first, humorous thought. But on a more serious note, it just poses the question that John described earlier. Where are we in creating new music and rethinking material from the past? My answer is that you certainly can write a wild new fantasy while observing Bach and Ravel and everything in between, but everyone has to answer that for themselves. It’s a big question, but it is the question.
