The Wind in High Places

John Luther Adams’s haunting, carefully shaped, gracefully stirring pieces on this album, which New York Times critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim called “mesmerizing,” seem to alter common notions of musical time and unfold in a temporal space of their own creation, as do so many of Adams’s works. Beautifully serene and vaporous string music, featuring the acclaimed JACK Quartet performing the three-movement The Wind in High Places and Dream of the Canyon Wren and the Northwestern Cello Ensemble, directed by Hans Jensen, performing the four-movement cello choir work Canticles of the Sky. THE COMPOSER WRITES . . . The Wind in High Places. "I’ve long been enamored with the ethereal tones of Aeolian harps—instruments that draw their music directly from the wind. The Wind in High Places treats the string quartet as a large, sixteen-stringed harp. "All the sounds in the piece are produced as natural harmonics or on open strings. Over the course of almost twenty minutes, the fingers of the musicians never touch the fingerboards of the instruments. "If I could’ve found a way to make this music without them touching the instruments at all, I would have." Four Canticles of the Sky: "In the Arctic sky, the low angle of the sun and heavy ice crystals in the air often produce vivid halos, arcs, and sundogs. Sometimes these phenomena create the illusion of multiple suns. Sky with Four Suns is a musical evocation of such an apparition, from sunrise to sunset. "Similar visions also occur at night, which is the image behind Sky with Four Moons. "Sky with Nameless Colors and Sky with Endless Stars were inspired by the skies of the Sonoran Desert." Dream of the Canyon Wren "For forty years the song of the hermit thrush has been for me the quintessential voice of my home in the boreal forest of Alaska. In recent years I’ve found a new home in the desert, where the song of the canyon wren evokes for me similar feelings of deep tranquility and longing." REVIEWS “The album’s thought is evident without being distracting…. The skilled fusion of the JACK Quartet turns The Wind into something other than a three-movement work. It’s like watching something take flight and, as the final notes fade, blend in with the sky.” (Q2 Music, WQXR) “A striking new album of austere landscapes and mysterious light.” (Tom Huizenga, Deceptive Cadence, NPR) “John Luther Adams gives us some of his most intimate music on this one. It communicates directly and with sublimity.” (Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review) “The Wind in High Places, like much of Adams’ writing, inhabits its own unique, atemporal sphere.” (Textura) “The Wind in High Places, a tripartite piece for string quartet that uses only natural harmonics and open strings—played extremely quietly—to create a still, pastoral ambience…. Could any new music be more delicately sparse, more wonderfully poetic? I think not.” (John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune) “Most of the dazzling oeuvre of Alaskan composer John Luther Adams is inspired by and informed by nature, and the three recent works on this excellent album are no exception. The title piece adapts the principles underlying the Aeolian harp, which is played by the wind; it treats the ensemble, in this case New York’s versatile JACK Quartet, as a single 16-string instrument. Throughout its nearly 20 minutes, the players never touch their fingerboards, instead rendering its austere, melancholy melodies with open strings and ghostly harmonics. Just as gorgeous and ethereal is Canticles of the Sky, performed by the Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, which means to evoke the way atmospheric conditions can create the suggestion of a multitude of suns or moons in the arctic and in the Sonoran Desert. The final piece, played by JACK, delivers Adams’s adaption of the song of the canyon wren.” (Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader) “The performances are delicate and otherworldly, exactly as required.” (American Record Guide) “John Luther Adams . . . whose music is concerned with—and inspired by—natural landscapes, wrote the three-movement string quartet The Wind in High Places two years earlier than Become Ocean but it shares many of the same characteristics: a distinctive, narrow sound world, glacial thematic movement and a sense of openness and wonder. However, as performed by the outstanding Jack Quartet, the earlier work is a more introspective, spectral composition. Featuring only natural harmonics and open strings, it evocatively reflects its title in its high, ethereal palette of sound. At its core, flanked by the slow outer movements, the middle section, ‘Maclaren Summit,’ glides and soars through a haze of wonderfully blended harmonics. The two other works here—the four-movement Canticles of the Sky for ‘cello choir’ and Dream of the Canyon Wren, again with the Jack Quartet—are built from more traditional string textures, the latter vivid and unsettling, the former more lush and filmic. All the works are recorded immaculately: dry and exact for the Jack Quartet and with warming reverberation for the excellent cello ensemble from Northwestern University.” (Tim Woodall, The Strad)