Frenzy

Program notes

About the Work

Frenzy is the most recent of John Adams’s large orchestral scores, and the London Symphony Orchestra has a claim on it. Adams composed it in 2023 and dedicated it to Sir Simon Rattle, who conducted the first performance with the LSO at the Barbican on 3 March 2024 and then took it on tour to Bristol, Dortmund, Luxembourg and Paris. It returns to open the first of the orchestra’s concerts for the composer’s eightieth birthday.

The subtitle, ‘a short symphony’, is meant literally. In his own note Adams calls the piece a one-movement symphony that fits ‘a variegated yet unified symphonic structure’ into about twenty minutes. What sets it apart from his other music, he says, is its concentration, ‘almost to the point of obsession’, on developing and transforming small, vivid motives. That is the old classical craft of working out a theme, the thing German musicians call Durchführung, and it is a different habit of mind from the gradual change through repetition that drove his earlier, minimalist-influenced scores. Adams writes that the finished piece surprised him by turning out to be a meeting of the two methods: the rhythm still rides on a steady pulse, while the melodic ideas keep changing shape and spinning themselves out.

In a note for his publisher he adds that the starting point was a brief quotation from his opera Antony and Cleopatra, which he then led through ‘an extended hall of mirrors’, twisting and reshaping it. The same note quotes the dictionary definition of the title, from ‘agitation or disorder of the mind’ to ‘a mania for something’, and links the word to the feeling, at times overwhelming, of taking in the world through a daily dose of digital news.

The title is a little misleading all the same. Adams describes the music as ‘generally buoyant and extrovert’, and says that it holds back its truly frenetic energy until the closing moments. He has also said that the piece has its share of repose and good humour, which he thinks fitting for a work dedicated to Rattle, a longtime friend and a champion of his music.

What to Listen For

The first bars set out the two ideas that matter: a sharp, punctuated tattoo in the winds and brass, and against it an urgent, muscular theme in the upper strings. Keep both in your ear. Adams says they reappear throughout the piece, ‘always transformed in one way or another and yet always identifiable’, and following their disguises is the surest way through.

There is no separate slow movement. In its place the surface of the music simply thins and quietens. The pulse carries on in a gentle exchange between the two harps and the celesta, and the strings float a long lyrical melody above them.

The last section is where the title is earned. Adams lists the ingredients himself: hard-driven, choppy string figures, ‘tsunami-like waves of brass’ and madly scurrying woodwinds, all converging on the finish.