Music review: Third Angle opens season with John Luther Adams ...

How does sound evoke a sense of place? If the titles didn't tip you off, would you know that Ottorino Respighi's Roman triptych was about Rome, or that the honks and beeps of George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" were meant to evoke specifically Parisian traffic? Would commentators consistently identify northern imagery in Jean Sibelius' music if they didn't know he was Finnish?

The idea is central to John Luther Adams' "Earth and the Great Weather," with which Third Angle opened its season Friday night at Lewis & Clark College's Agnes Flanagan Chapel. In an epic piece of what he calls "sonic geography," Adams -- the Mississippi-born Alaskan composer, not to be confused with John Adams, the Massachusetts-born Californian composer -- aimed to create a landscape in sound drawn from the real landscape of northeastern Alaska, the location of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Like the place, the music was vast and austere. Forces were relatively few, with four strings (one each of violin, viola, cello and bass), four voices, and four percussionists, plus tape and electronic effects. The taped portion included texts in Inupiaq and Gwich'in with English translation, most of them descriptive of the environment, along with sounds of nature -- water, wind, birdsong. At times, delayed playback created a sort of electronic shimmer throughout the room, like the sonic equivalent of the aurora borealis.

The 10 movements progressed slowly and with a sort of organic grandeur, in long breathing arcs echoing the taped sound of wind that opened the piece. The three treble voices lent attenuated luminous dissonances; strings contributed eerie, glassy harmonics. Shivering bows in "The Circle of Winds" suggested both wind and the relentless mosquitoes of an Alaskan summer. Punctuating the structure were three movements of hard-driving, viscerally gripping percussion, reflecting Adams' early experience as a rock drummer.

In remarks before the concert, Third Angle violinist and artistic director Ron Blessinger said the ensemble liked to stretch itself, and that "Earth and the Great Weather" required a lot of stretching -- "it's musical yoga." For the audience, too, it was a stretch, though not in the way that modern music is often said to be. Extended over an uninterrupted hour and a half, Adams' simple, often atmospheric sonic geography both centered listeners in a sound environment and transported them to a remote place, part real, part imaginary and thoroughly distinct.

-- James McQuillen, Special to The Oregonian

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Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/09/music_review_third_angle_opens.html

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