After the Fall

Program notes

About the Work

After the Fall is a piano concerto in all but name, the third full-scale work for piano and orchestra that Adams has written. Century Rolls was composed for Emanuel Ax in 1996 and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? for Yuja Wang in 2018. This one was written in 2024 for Víkingur Ólafsson, whom Adams had heard play the second of those concertos and had come to know on tour. Ólafsson gave the first performance on 16 January 2025 with the San Francisco Symphony under David Robertson, and then took the piece round the orchestras and halls that had shared in the commission. Two of the commissioners were Viennese, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Wiener Symphoniker, so the city has heard the work before. These are performances by the pianist it was written for, with the composer conducting.

The title has two sources. One is domestic. Adams’s son, Samuel Carl Adams, is also a composer, and his piano concerto No Such Spring was first played in 2023. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams has said. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.”

The other is the double sense of the word: autumn, and the loss of Paradise. According to his publisher, Adams connects it with a remark by Pierre Boulez, who declared that the age of the avant-garde was over and that what remained was an era of return, consolidation and quotation, with the whole of music history available as a library of models. Boulez meant it as a diagnosis of decline. Adams, who has always written with the past in plain view, takes it as a description of how he works.

The past in this case is Bach. While Adams was composing, Ólafsson was on a world tour devoted to the Goldberg Variations, 88 performances in all. “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess,” Adams remarked. In the last part of the concerto the C minor Prelude from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier surfaces in the music.

The orchestra is of normal size but lightly brassed, with two trumpets and no tuba, and its colours come from two harps, celesta and tuned percussion. The piece plays for a little under half an hour.

What to Listen For

Adams’s two earlier piano concertos are laid out fast, slow, fast. This one behaves more like a fantasia. Reviewing the premiere, the critic Harvey Steiman noted that no idea lasts more than a minute or two before it turns into the next, each one growing out of what came before. It is easiest to follow as a chain of episodes.

The opening is a soft haze of harmony in the orchestra. The piano enters with chords that rise and fall like a line of chant, and the music drifts into a rhythm that is almost a tango. A calmer passage follows, with slow arpeggios in octaves for the soloist, and then a nervous, angrier one.

Bach is present long before he is quoted. The piano’s spare, repeated figures and its exchanges with the orchestra have something of a Brandenburg Concerto about them, in modern harmony. When the C minor Prelude finally appears, close to note for note, it does not stay intact for long: thicker chords attach themselves to it and bend it out of shape. The publisher compares the effect to a hall of mirrors, a device Adams had tried on Beethoven in Absolute Jest.

Watch for the false ending. The tempo picks up and a loud finish seems certain; a few jabs from the brass stop it, and the concerto closes quietly. Steiman likened the last page to a jazz ballad.