The Salomon Orchestra present John Adams' Harmonielehre. Charlie Lovell-Jones plays Barber’s Violin Concerto.
Composed in 1941 during his time in America, Britten’s An American Overture was intended for the Cleveland Orchestra, but was never performed during the composer’s lifetime, receiving its premiere in Birmingham in 1983. Barber’s much-loved Violin Concerto, composed two years earlier, features soloist Charlie Lovell-Jones.
John Adams said that Harmonielehre was inspired by a dream he had in which he was driving across the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like a Saturn V rocket. This dream and the composition of Harmonielehre shortly thereafter ended a writer’s block Adams had been experiencing for 18 months. He also described the work as “a once-only essay in the wedding of fin-de-siècle chromatic harmony with the rhythmic and formal procedures of Minimalism”.
Image: Frank Noon Photography
