 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) A half-speed mastered, new LP transfer of a best-selling album in the acclaimed series of minimalist piano music recorded by Jeroen van Veen for Brilliant Classics. ‘Throughout, the playing’s brilliant, confident, and sonorous’: this album of the piano output of John Adams won glowing reviews when it was first released in 2017. As an indefatigable champion of minimalist music from both sides of the Atlantic, Jeroen van Veen had recorded some of these pieces before, within his compendious ‘Minimal Piano Collection’ which became an essential acquisition for collectors of the most influential classical style in music during the last 60 years. The 2017 remake of China Gates is even more opulent as a performance, superbly engineered to catch van Veen’s subtleties of touch at the piano, and thus eminently suitable for a high-spec vinyl transfer. ‘There’s something quite nice about encountering interpretations of these perennial Adams favourites that sound so comfortable,’ continued the Arts Fuse review: ‘a pianist enjoying himself, freely exploring the enveloping diatonicism of the music.’ Adams regards Phrygian Gates (1977) as his ‘first mature composition’, and it may seem strange that he has not since written more for solo piano than the four pieces gathered here, but as Jeroen van Veen argues in his sleeve-note essay, these pieces between them say all that needs to be said in terms of the composer’s piano style. Mostly composed in a West Coast beach hut, the gentle flow, rolling swells and thundering breakers of Phrygian Gates add up to a half-hour, overpowering analogy for melodic waves. From the same year, China Gates distils this energy into a five-minute work of memorably concentrated stillness. Adams left off the piano for another 20 years until writing Hallelujah Junction for two pianos in 1996. Van Veen gave the Dutch premiere, and he remains an outstanding, authoritative advocate of Adams’ music.
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