Ólafsson & Adams & Wiener Philharmoniker
John Adams on the conductor’s rostrum and the Vienna Philharmonic performing his music exclusively! The Czech premiere of the piano concerto After the Fall played by Grammy Award holder Víkingur Ólafsson.
Programme
- John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine
- John Adams: After the Fall
- John Adams: Harmonielehre
Performers
- Wiener Philharmoniker
- John Adams – conductor
- Víkingur Ólafsson – piano
“Since I had recently taken a ride in a very fancy Italian sportscar driven by a friend of mine, I had not yet recovered from that rather terrifying experience,” American star John Adams (1947) declared in 1986, referring to the genesis of his virtuosic work for orchestra entitled Short Ride in a Fast Machine. This four-minute sprint of colours and rhythms, a piece only the world’s finest orchestras dare to tackle, will open a special Prague Spring evening spent in the company of the Vienna Philharmonic, during which John Adams will conduct a programme comprised exclusively of his own works. The concert will include the Czech premiere of the concerto from 2024 After the Fall, which Adams wrote for the superb Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. The composer was inspired in his work by Ólafsson’s exceptional interpretation of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, for which this likeable artist won his first Grammy in 2025. This “skilled DJ blend”, as American station KQED defined Adams’s treatment of Bach’s music, develops the motif from the famous Prelude in C minor from the first part of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Harmonielehre
The “thrill ride that brims with tangy harmonies, dazzling pianistic flourishes and, most of all, a panoply of distinctive rhythms”, as a critic described Adams’s piano concerto, will be followed by one of the iconic works of the latter half of the 20th century. It was no coincidence that Adams named his piece Harmonielehre after Schoenberg’s celebrated harmony textbook. The extensive three-movement work, which blends minimalist techniques with the expressive world of the “fin de siècle”, begins with hefty, thunderous chords which take Adams back into one of his dreams, in which he had watched “a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket”. Likewise, the final part Meister Eckhardt and Quackie is a reference to a dream Adams had shortly after the birth of his daughter Emily. In the dream the little girl perches on the shoulders of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhardt and together they hover among the stars like painted figures on the high ceiling of an old cathedral…
