Violin Concerto

A leap beyond his early post-minimalist style, John Adams’ Violin Concerto places melody at the music’s forefront with surging, extended rhapsodies for the solo instrument. Composed in 1993 for the late Minnesota Orchestra concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis, the piece represented a fresh challenge for Adams, who until then favoured a compositional language that was, he said, “principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy”. Adams had recently completed his opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which had, he says, forced him to concentrate more on singing lines. In the first movement, the violin line unfurls in long, fantastical phrases, atop steadily rising harmonies in the orchestra, and capped with a brief cadenza. Adams subtitles the second movement “Body Through Which the Dream Flows”, after a poem by Robert Hass, and envisions the violin as the “dream” that flows through the pulsating orchestral “body” (the form is a chaconne, or repeated harmonic sequence). The finale, “Toccare”, is an unremitting perpetual motion vehicle with occasional bluesy flourishes and bright splashes of orchestral colour. The Violin Concerto has thrived in the hands of other prominent interpreters including Gidon Kremer (who made the first recording) and Leila Josefowicz, who has made it a personal calling card.