What became apparent to composer John Adams in the aftermath of the horrifying events of 9/11 is that American classical music did not have a single orchestral work that could adequately address the worldwide sense of shock, loss — and fellowship.
In January 2002, the New York Philharmonic asked him to compose a memorial to the victims of the attacks, but Adams had no intention of trying to fill the vacuum he detected. In fact, he was reluctant to take the assignment at all.
He was appalled, he wrote in his 2008 memoir, by the idea of a such a piece. “It seemed like a fool’s errand, trying to make musical or poetic expression of an event that continued to ache like a raw nerve in the national psyche.”
But Adams did accept the philharmonic’s commission, and conductor Jeffrey Kahane believes the resulting work, “On the Transmigration of Souls,” does answer this country’s long-harbored need for a uniting work that can speak to great loss and sadness.
Kahane will lead the piece this weekend as part of his penultimate — and perhaps climactic — program as music director of the Colorado Symphony. In July 2008, he announced he would step down in June after five seasons in the position.
The maestro, who was forced to cancel a series of appearances in 2007 because of severe hypertension, said in 2008 that he realized the demands of being music director were too much if he wanted to maintain his international career as a piano soloist.
“I don’t think I underestimated the job,” he said at the time. “I think I overestimated myself, not in my abilities but just being in a body and turning 50.”
As part of Kahane’s farewell, it was only natural to program Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, “Choral Symphony,” a transcendent work performed internationally to celebrate momentous occasions of all kinds. The question was: What to couple with it?
The 9/11 work “struck me as an ideal pairing on a number of levels,” Kahane said. “It’s the right length, but more importantly, both of the pieces have to do fundamentally with the idea of community, with the human family.”
Emotionally, the two balance each other — one an ode to joy, the other a meditation on loss. But structurally, “Transmigration” could hardly be more different from Beethoven’s Ninth.
“It’s not a symphony,” Ka hane said. “It’s not an oratorio. It’s not a piece that falls into any category to which I could easily give a name.”
Although punctuated at times with loud, jagged bursts, the 23-minute piece is ruminative and almost disconcertingly intimate. Adams has described it as a “memory space.”
The orchestra music and choral singing are performed simultaneously with a soundtrack. They weave together subtle, ambient sounds of New York City with voices reciting names of victims and fragments of sentences, including phrases taken from the thousands of desperate missing-person posters in the aftermath of the attacks.
“We all, that morning, looked at the world and realized that the world had changed forever and that America was never going to be the same and the world was never going to be the same for us,” Kahane said.
“What John does in this piece so remarkably is somehow bring together the global, or even cosmic, aspect of that with the very deeply personal. It’s mostly a very gentle piece with a few very powerful and necessary exceptions.”
Adams plans to attend tonight’s opening concert, in part to honor the end of Ka hane’s tenure as music director. The two friends have known each other since Kahane was 16 and beginning his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory, where Adams had joined the faculty at age 26 after moving from the East Coast to the Bay Area.
“I can’t babysit my pieces,” Adams said in a recent Post interview, “but when it’s something very special — I mean, Jeff has gone way out on a limb to do a piece like this, and I really want to support him.”
In his memoir, Adams said that during performances of “Transmigration” after its premiere in the fall of 2002, he found himself vacillating between loathing and loving it. More recently, he said he’s tilting toward the latter.
“I don’t know why I even said that,” he said. “It wasn’t the piece itself; it was just the tonality of the media and the whole way 9/11 was presented.
“It was a great tragedy, and everybody felt shocked and deeply wounded as a country, but, then, not long after that, it became a rallying cry for the worst kind of phony patriotism.”
“It was largely used as a false excuse for the Iraq war, and the media — magazines and television — just ended up cashing in on the event . . . I didn’t want my piece to be part of that festival of false grief.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
BEETHOVEN’S SYMPHONE NO. 9Classical Music. Boettcher Concert Hall, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Jeffrey Kahane leads his penultimate weekend of concerts as music director of the Colorado Symphony. The concert pairs the regional premiere of John Adams’ “On The Transmigration of Souls” with Beethoven’s famed Symphony No. 9. The soloists will be: soprano Charlotte Dobbs, mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick, tenor Benjamin Butterfield and baritone Robert Gardner. 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday. $26-$100. 303-623-7876 or
