The most toured new piano concerto
OrchestrasTop-selling pianist Vikingur Ólafsson will premiere John Adams’s new piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony on January 16, with repeats on two successive nights.
The concerto is titled After the Fall, and look what comes next.
Performances are scheduled between January and May in Zurich, Hamburg and Vienna, with more to follow in London, Gothenburg and Los Angeles. Not a bad run for unheard new music.
Adams is excellent and is only getting better! Well deserved.
(As opposed to the still stagnating music of Reich)
An up to now unheard concerto, but composed by John Adams, thus we know more or less what is coming around.
…and around and around…
Respectfully, the most toured new piano concerto is Peter Boyer’s “Rhapsody in Red, White & Blue” with 57 orchestras in all 50 states in the US, with a London Symphony recording. The performances to date have been with over 30 orchestras and will continue through 2026. It is wonderful to see John Adams new concerto getting heard in so many places by the young and brilliant pianist, Vikingur. I hope to see him foster the further evolution of new music through his career.
Vikingur “brilliant”?
Hmmm…..
(…as Nathan Lane would say, “You need to get out more.”)
Adams is good at piano concertos, he knows what audiences want. Here is his Naked Concerto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3M1z3ITIf4
As orchestra budgets dwindle it’s not unusual to have multiple orchestras jointly commissioning a single work, which is then presented by each partner in the next season or so. So the cited Adams example is becoming more and more common, in fact.
This might actually be a good idea, in the sense that the music is heard more than once. And the composer might even be able to make small adjustments to the score based on the audience reaction, if he feels something hasn’t worked.