Search - John Luthe Adams: Strange and Sacred Noise on DVD

Great performances and great edition.

Francisco Yanez Calvino | Santiago de Compostela, GALIZA, Spain. | 05/22/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have this DVD since five months ago, as I had to make a review for a Spanish magazine of Classical Music, so in that time I've listened it several times to write that review... I use to take time and several auditions to do it.

In general terms the work is not the kind of music I love, that is Lachenmann, Xenakis, Feldman, Ligeti, Nono, Kurtág, Ferneyhough, etc., but the present DVD is really marvellous for those who love John Luther Adams' music.

Strange and Sacred Noise is a work composed for a group of percussionists in nine pieces, many of them dedicated to composers Adams loves, like Feldman or Xenakis, even his music is not very close to that of those composers, and Adams offers to us something much more close to minimalism; very repetitive cells, many of them really not very complex. Anyway, he creates some interesting effects with the different instruments, like it's the case of the drums, crotales or the sirens.

This `tour de force' for percussion was created with the Percussion Group of Cincinnati, and in the DVD is recorded a conversation between Adams and the leader of that group, an interview in which they talk about how they decided the construction of the pieces, form the initial idea of Adams, that came to him watching and hearing the broken of the ice in the river Yukon, in Alaska, the place where he lives and the enviroment he tries to reconstruct in his works, a kind of psychoacoustic of the natural landscape, like Adams says.

The sound of this DVD is amazing, in different possibilities, from two channel stereo to 5.0 surround, and dts too. In the CD lay it sounds wonderful too.

The performance is perfect, and the own composer is amazed by that group, very close to him in the last years, years in which Adams has been exploring the most violent aspects of nature in winter time in Alaska.

If you like Adams music this is a CD for not to be missed.
"