Emerald City Music, a Seattle-based chamber music ensemble in its second season, “landed an opportunity to present a world premiere from one of today’s hottest composers,” writes Thomas May in Sunday’s (9/10) Seattle Times. The group’s opening performances this month “will unveil ‘there is no one, not even the wind …’ by John Luther Adams…. ‘It’s actually the first of two JLA premieres this season,’ [Emerald City Music Executive Director Andrew] Goldstein pointed out…. [The] Seattle Symphony’s ‘Become Desert’ … will premiere in March, with Ludovic Morlot on the podium, before the symphony takes the piece on tour to California…. The Seattle Symphony’s first collaboration with Adams … titled ‘Become Ocean’ and premiered in 2013 … won a Pulitzer Prize.… ‘Become Desert’ will be a similarly massive orchestral work…. Adams … and his wife, Cynthia … now make their home mainly in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. The title ‘there is no one, not even the wind …’ is also the inscription Adams used for his new ‘Become Desert’ score. It’s a variation on a line from a poem by Octavio Paz that, says the composer, ‘speaks so beautifully of the feeling one has of being in a big, open, solitary, quiet place.’ ”
Posted September 12, 2017
