Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Absolute Jest, for string quartet and orchestra

The Australian String Quartet joins the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under Ludovic Morlot for an enjoyable and  timely round of Beethoven interleaved with John Adams' homage to the 250-year old composer. 

Dos siglos de música unidos por el genio de Beethoven en el Palacio Euskalduna de mano de la BOS y el Cuarteto Quiroga.

Absolute Jest sounds like perfect fare for an April Fool's Day concert. John Adams quotes Beethoven in many guises in his jolly work for string quartet and orchestra. 

Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony electrify Edinburgh with Mahler 1. 

In a program conceived by composer and conductor John Adams, Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite, Adams’ own Absolute Jest and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 sounded in sympathetic resonance with Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England.

Inspiration for a composition can come in many forms; a letter from Clara Schumann, the brutality of Stalin's police, growing deaf or hearing birdsong. The final concert of John Adams’ short residency at the Barbican focused on a more reverent strain of influence, however: the peculiar tendency for living composers to want to reference dead ones.

Bravo to Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for blowing the dust off of some of the boldest innovators America has produced. As part of a mini-festival at Carnegie Hall of 20th- and 21st-century composers who stretched musical and formal boundaries (to put it mildly), the program on Tuesday night was packed with rarely-played wonders.