Czech Philharmonic • Evgeny Kissin

It was not long ago that the American composer John Adams (*1947) visited Prague, appearing at the 2023 Prague Spring International Music Festival as a conductor and a composer. The media and the press have called him “a living legend of American music” and one of today’s most important composers. Adams started on the path to fame when he learned to play the clarinet as a child and joined a marching band. The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams also made a great impression on him, and he began making his first attempts at composition. He later studied at Harvard University. Since 1971, his life and career have mainly been associated with San Francisco: he taught at the conservatoire there for ten years and composed for the acclaimed San Francisco Symphony. Today, Adams’s music is played all around the world, and in various places he has earned honorary doctorates (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Cambridge) and prizes (e.g. the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2019 Erasmus Prize). Contributing to his fame is the courage to deal with sensitive contemporary topics, including political ones (the opera Nixon in China is just one such example) and themes that are historical, philosophical, religious, or related to literature. He is characterised as an artist who is at once “exalted and vulgar”, taking inspiration from a wide variety of forms of pop culture and the classics.

The orchestral composition Frenzy (2023) is also along these lines. According to Adams, the composition is supposed to express the feeling of a present-day person perceiving the surrounding world through a matrix of endless digital messages and information of all kinds. The person may feel excited, swept along, or even overwhelmed. The word “frenzy” can mean unrest, a mental disturbance, wild foolishness, a crazy idea, frenetic behaviour, intense enthusiasm, or even obsession. Adams has described his own sometimes passionate engagement with the development of melodic and rhythmic motifs, which appear over and over during a composition and undergo various transformations. He tends to be classified with the minimalists, or even better, with the post-minimalists, although he resists such a categorisation and says he has gone beyond his minimalistic past. Formally, Frenzy is a symphony in one movement for a large orchestra that includes celesta, two harps, and vibraphone. John Adams dedicated this work to his friend of many years, the conductor Sir Simon Rattle, and in a bit of jest, he said that Frenzy “is not without moments of tranquillity and good humour”, just like his friend’s personality. Rattle led the London Symphony Orchestra in the work’s world premiere in March 2024, and more performances have followed in the USA and Europe.

Much of Sergei Prokofiev’s (1891–1953) large oeuvre consists of piano music, including five piano concertos. It is no wonder that he was successful as a piano student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, and his contemporaries sometimes regarded him more as an outstanding instrumentalist than as a composer. His mother taught him the fundamentals of piano playing, and he learned the basics of music theory from Reinhold Glière. He began composing at age five, and he continued to perfect his craft under Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, again at the conservatoire in Saint Petersburg. According to contemporary accounts, Prokofiev was eccentric, self-confident, and an enfant terrible in terms of his opinions on contemporary music. His behaviour attracted attention, but also resentment. At the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, he studied piano and composition as well as conducting, but the school clung to tradition and was not eager to support innovation. Despite this, Prokofiev seized the opportunity to play his own Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat major, Op. 10, when he took part in the conservatoire’s piano competition in 1914, and he became the winner.

He began composing his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1911 at age 20. Having initially conceived a typical concerto with multiple movements, in the end he was drawn to the idea of a smaller form, which he described as “a concertino full of the joy of life and with an amazing opening theme”. What ultimately emerged was the shortest of Prokofiev’s concertos, the Piano Concerto in D flat major. In it, three movements seem to be combined into one. It is this grand, romantically conceived theme that becomes the linchpin of the whole composition, heard at the beginning, near the middle, and again at the end. It would not, however, have been like the young Prokofiev if that sweeping theme in octaves were not followed by brilliant passages for the piano, letting the soloist demonstrate outstanding technique, virtuosity, wit, and sensitivity for dialogue with the orchestra. The composer’s handling of tonality is very sophisticated, but he did not go beyond its boundaries. At the concerto’s public premiere in August of 1912 in Moscow, Prokofiev himself played the piano part, and on the conducting podium was Konstantin Saradzhev, a musician of Armenian descent. In his diary, the composer noted that the event was an exceptionally pleasing success, and that he was asked to play several encores. Prokofiev dedicated the work to Nikolai Tcherepnin, his conducting teacher.

For most of us, the word “enigma” automatically evokes associations with the legendary coding device used from the 1920s and made notorious by its use during the Second World War. Let us recall the scene from the film The Imitation Game and the electronic decoding machine built by the team surrounding Alan Turing: the pulse of a machine reminiscent of stereotypical rhythmic music, a depersonalised power capable of influencing the actions and fates of people (so close to the ideas of John Adams!). Naturally, the English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was unaware of any of this when he composed his Enigma, the Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (1898–1899). At the time, it was not easy for Elgar to provide for his family on a teacher’s salary or to bear the repeated rejection of his compositions by performers and publishers. The fourteen orchestral variations were first presented to the public in June 1899 under the baton of the renowned conductor Hans Richter, marking Elgar’s breakthrough and the start of his rapid rise to fame.

Enigma, i.e. mystery or secret, is worthy of its title. Elgar conceived each section as a portrait of a friend, student, or family member. Scholars have successfully identified their identities for the most part based on the initials or other references in the titles of the individual variations. To begin with, there is a vary romantic characterisation of Elgar’s wife Caroline Alice, while the final variation depicts the composer himself. Experts on the cultural and societal milieu of central England at the end of the 19th century would enjoy an enumeration of all of these persons, but here we shall mention at least the amateur actor Richard Baxter Townshend with his ability to change the register of his voice (Variation III – “R.B.T.”), Elgar’s friend August Johannes Jaeger from the publisher Novello (Variation IX – “Nimrod”), and the organist George R. Sinclair and his bulldog Dan (Variation XI – “G.R.S.”). Besides the usual means of expression, Elgar illustrated the character and stories from the lives of his friends by quoting classical music, such as a reference to Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte in Dorabella (Dory Penny, Variation X), while “Nimrod” recalls a conversation between Elgar and Jaeger about Beethoven by quoting the Pathétique Sonata. Elgar also concealed another riddle that is undetectable to the ear, and it remains unsolved; incidentally, besides sports and science, Elgar is known to have loved riddles. Elgar originally used Enigma as the title of only the main major/minor theme (Andante), but already the first edition of the score (Novello 1899) bears the full title Enigma Variations. Of course, even without deeper knowledge of the specific individuals depicted in the variations, the listener can surely enjoy Elgar’s late-romantic, affectionate, and witty music.