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Review: John Luther Adams, 'Become Ocean'

John Luther Adams' new album, <em>Become Ocean</em>, comes out Sept. 30.
Molly Sheridan
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Courtesy of the artist
John Luther Adams' new album, Become Ocean, comes out Sept. 30.

When John Luther Adams' sweeping orchestral piece Become Oceanwas performed at Carnegie Hall for the first time in May, it was also the first time the composer had attended a concert there. As Adams told my colleague Tom Huizenga in April, when Become Oceanwon the Pulitzer for music: "Early on, I didn't win the right prizes. It seems that every time I had the opportunity to make the right career choice, I made the wrong career choice, which in the long run turned out to be the right artistic choice."

Even though public recognition has been too long in coming, Adams' music has found its rightful place, and the timing of a piece the composer explicitly links to environmental issues — the melting of polar ice and the rise of global sea levels — couldn't feel more urgent. Aesthetically and thematically, this is the time for Become Ocean.

In certain ways, Adams' piece is as much a seascape as Debussy's iconic La Mer, in its roiling waves of sound curling up and out, building to climaxes and receding, and at the end not so much ebbing as subsuming everything else. (Its final silence is deafening.) But fans of the so-called minimalist composers like Philip Glass and John Adams (no relation) will find a home in John Luther Adams' work, too. Become Ocean ushers you in and swallows you up. It's gorgeous, darkly beautiful and ultimately unsettling.

Adams famously builds his music into exceedingly elegant though highly unusual structures. In works like Inuksuit (for nine to 99 percussionists) and his recent Sila: The Breath Of The World, the audience is welcome to weave in and out between performers, meaning that no two listeners perceive the experience the same way. Though destined for a traditional concert hall, Become Ocean — which juxtaposes three mini-orchestras within the larger ensemble — operates in a hauntingly familiar and visceral fashion, as Adams submerges listeners in surges of briny sound.

Become Oceanwas commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, which gave its premiere in its home city, brought it to Carnegie Hall and made this recording. Led by conductor Ludovic Morlot, the performance is powerful and empathetic, enhanced by crisp sound that makes even the smallest harp and piano arpeggios stand out pointillistically against lush washes of brass and strings. It's a potent project whose time has come.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tom Huizenga
Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.
Anastasia Tsioulcas
Anastasia Tsioulcas is a reporter on NPR's Arts desk. She is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity, and primarily reports on music. Recently, she has extensively covered gender issues and #MeToo in the music industry, including backstage tumult and alleged secret deals in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against megastar singer Plácido Domingo; gender inequity issues at the Grammy Awards and the myriad accusations of sexual misconduct against singer R. Kelly.