John Adams (1947-)
"China Gates"
"Phrygian Gates"
"American Berserk"
"Hallelujah Junction"

Jeroen van Veen, piano
Sandra van Veen, piano

Porte-drapeau du minimalisme aux Pays-Bas, Jeroen Van Veen, compositeur et surtout interprète prolifique - ses enregistrements se comptent par dizaines - rassemble ici l’intégrale de la musique pour piano de Johan Adams. Le disque s’ouvre sur le diptyque "China Gates" / "Phrygian Gates", deux pièces écrites en 1977, l’une, délicate miniature, pour la jeune pianiste Sarah Cahill, l’autre, défi technique et virtuose, pour l’ami Mack McCray. À trente ans, ces premiers travaux pour piano constituent l’opus premier du compositeur, ses œuvres « les plus strictement organisées et rigoureusement ordonnées ». Il faut y voir le fruit de son initiation au minimalisme : Adams entend In C de Terry Riley en 1971, « merveilleusement provocateur, faisant un doigt d’honneur au monde pédant et ennuyeux du modernisme académique » et assiste à une représentation de Drumming par le Steve Reich Ensemble en 1974, « une approche différente mais tout aussi moderne de la pulsation comme principe directeur de la musique ». Très rythmique, Hallelujah Junction (1976) clôt ce bel album en une résonance particulière issue du léger retard entre les deux pianos, les thèmes fluctuant d’un instrumentiste vers l’autre (Sandra Van Veen), au point de finalement se confondre. (Bernard Vincken)

Piano music spanning three decades by the foremost living Minimalist composer of our time. John Adams has won listeners from far beyond the traditional classical world thanks to his energy over the course of more than half a century in writing music that speaks directly to hearts and minds with undiminished energy, reflecting contemporary concerns and technologies while also crafted with traditional finesse. As well as a composer he has been an active promoter and performer – not only of his own music but of his contemporaries and those who exercised a decisive influence on him as a student in California, including Debussy and Stravinsky. His parents were both jazz musicians and he grew up in a household where, as he says, ‘Benny Goodman and Mozart were not separated’. There is a corresponding harmony between traditional and modern idioms in his own music. Both written in 1977, Phrygian Gates and its briefer pendant or companion, China Gates, were game-changers for the course of Adams’s music. Although his output for the instrument is not large, it was with the piano that Adams discovered the possibilities of slowly moving, patterned textures that had already seized his attention in the compositions of Steve Reich. Phrygian Gates is a broad monolithic arch, roughly 24 minutes long, which is built upon a plan that resembles the classic ‘tour’ of the twelve keys, while entirely confined to the Lydian and Phrygian modes of ancient music. The Lydian mode with its light, sensual, resonant personality is played off against the more volatile, unstable but often heroic qualities of the Phrygian. From almost 20 years later, Hallelujah Junction takes its name from a truck stop near the composer’s cabin. Scored for two pianos, this continuous quarter-hour takes a tour d’horizon of Adams’s own journey as a composer: at first ingeniously Minimalist, growing into a Romantic central section before coming around to a jazzy conclusion of unstoppable momentum. American Berserk (2001) sounds more ‘modern’ still, but its rhythmic complexities look back to American masters such as Ives and Nancarrow.