Music emerges from a dark tunnel, a smooth and liquid train with a large chorus as passengers. The accelerated evolution of
Harmonium
is brought forth in what Adams calls a “preverbal creation scene,” an
inescapable feeling of solitary light tinted with the weight of
retrospection as the voices intercede.
Harmonium seems to revel
in self-awareness, building as it does through a series of dynamic
swings from the threshold of audibility to ringing pronouncements of
verse. It is a convoluted world where density and transparency coexist
in equal measure.
At times this piece sounds like Adams’s popular Shaker Loops
with words, at others like a Philip Glass tribute with characteristic
pulses of flute and strings, at still others like a ritual of its own
kind. It is a pastiche of poetry (John Donne and Emily Dickinson provide
the texts), a bridge of intentions, a house with only two windows.
The recording quality here may polarize listeners somewhat. While on
the one hand it captures the overall mood of the piece in a rather
heterogeneous mix, on the other it loses detail in the quieter moments. I
would imagine, however, that engineering choices in this case were
dictated by Adams’s vision for the piece as a whole. It is meant to be a
single “fabric of sound,” thereby necessitating a more distanced
recording. It is like a lake: deceptively uniform from a distance, but
promising new life and environments if only we can plunge into its
depths. Yet somehow we are unable to take that plunge. The recording
engineer, like the listener, is an observer here rather than an
intruder. We do not approach this music; it approaches us, and it can
only come so far before receding into its womb. (ecmreviews.com)
