John Adams

“Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony was on the programme Adams conducted, along with Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, from Peter Grimes - both given with biting, visceral immediacy, as if he were at once laying bare and exalting the music’s imaginative constituents.” (The Sunday Times, March 2010)

“Yet City Noir, given a brilliant European premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction, is infused with the seething energies, menace and melodrama of one particular cinematic genre - the film noir. The restlessness, the sardonic relish of urban angst familiar from the hard-bitten tales of Hammett and Chandler seeps through it like a dark stain. But that is balanced by an overwhelming feeling of exhilaration at the dense, random and never-ending tangle of narratives in the modern metropolis.” (The Times, March 2010)

“Adams sets out to evoke the murky world of film noir, and paranoid string figures, stabbing brass, swooning sax and fiddly jazz drumming take us straight back to the Fifties. As the work unfolds, however, the colouring becomes bolder and brighter. Sometimes the music is hard-driven but frenzied activity repeatedly gives way to a musical clearing, momentarily recalling the calm after the storm in Britten’s Sea Interludes, which Adams performed at Sunday’s concert with the LSO.” (Evening Standard, March 2010)

“This was an extraordinarily compelling performance from the London Symphony Orchestra, directed by Adams himself… Adams activated the strong muscle of Britten’s writing: this was a performance less interested in the evocation of misty seascapes and salt-lashed winds than in the sheer power of musical abstraction. Then, within a warmly lyrical performance of Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony, Adams paid generous and compelling tribute to an early and much-revered master of minimalism.” (The Times, March 2010)

“Adams himself conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, with a relaxed air, as though displaying wonderful possessions.” (The Sunday Times, August 2007)