
Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, left, and composer John Adams after a 2022 performance of Adams’s “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” with the San Francisco Symphony. Ólafsson, conductor David Robertson, and the San Francisco Symphony perform Adams’s new piano concerto this January. Photo by Stefan Cohen/San Francisco Symphony
In Sunday’s (1/12) San Francisco Chronicle, Molly Colin writes, “It’s fitting that in [John Adams’s] new piano concerto, ‘After the Fall,’ written for Icelandic virtuoso Víkingur Ólafsson, Adams has nested a musical Easter egg toward the end in homage to Bach’s Prelude. Those in the audience should be on the lookout for it when Ólafsson, conductor David Robertson and the San Francisco Symphony give the world premiere of the work at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Jan. 16. (Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ is slated to share the program, scheduled to be repeated Jan. 18 and 19.)… ‘It’s sort of a wry acknowledgement that (Ólafsson) had played 88 performances of Bach while learning my piece,’ Adams [said], referring to the pianist’s recent world tour devoted to Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations.’ ‘After the Fall’ is Adams’ third full-scale piano concerto … The new work offers something familiar and different, said Robertson, a frequent Adams collaborator. ‘There are the classic hallmarks of John’s in terms of how he makes the orchestra sound and how he frames the solo voice of the piano,’ the New York City-based conductor [said]… ‘But the possibilities of how something might work … is miraculous in terms of the number of combinations he comes up with.’ ”