A sonic gift dropped July 10 at Chamber Music Northwest’s concert at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. Sandbox Percussion, the 13-year-old Brooklyn, NY-based group of four gifted musicians, performed John Luther Adams’ Prophecies of Fire, a much anticipated haunting world premiere about human-caused climate change. Oregon Bach Festival shared the commission, and Sandbox played it again July 13 in Eugene, Ore. 

There was more to the July 10 concert at Kaul than the world premiere. Two four-minute pieces by multi-cultural composer Gabriela Lena Frank opened the concert. Frank’s 2017 lightning-speed “Luciérnagas” (“Fireflies”) from Suite Mestizo for solo violin, performed by tiny powerhouse violinist/violist Julianne Lee (who recently joined the Dover Quartet as its violist), was followed  by the light-touch 2010 “Zapatos de Chincha” for violin and cello, which Lee and cellist Mark Kosower performed. Kosower, the principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra, then spontaneously threw in the un-programmed 1990 Russian Fragments by Rodion Shchedrin, a nine-minute solo cello collage piece that combined jazz, a Russian orthodox chant and various other melodies.

With such challenging and little-heard contemporary music performed by highly accomplished musicians, we received a multi-layered gift. Still, the blockbuster news, irrefutably, was Prophecies of Fire; the audience made no secret of eagerly awaiting it, earplugs, courtesy CMNW, in hand. (Some patrons changed seats due to CMNW’s warning of loudness, but with earplugs in, there was little danger or discomfort.) 

Adams, 71 years old and a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his 2014 Become Ocean, has said that Prophecies might be the last of his big chamber or symphony works. (See Brett Campbell’s Oregon Arts Watch profile on Adams.) But you never know. Those of us who love his music’s capacity to capture and embody nature — and especially love the ever growing percussion repertoire and Sandbox’s interpretations of it — hope we’ll hear more of Adams’ work. Who doesn’t want to be swept away?

The 31-minute piece was a perpetually accelerating canon, with each of the four musicians (Ian Rosenbaum, Victor Caccese, Terry Sweeney and Jonny Allen) playing the same music with matching sets of drums and other percussion. Surrounded by the audience, the percussionists were spaced several yards apart from one another as they moved to and fro on bass drums, timpani, snare drums, tam-tams and glockenspiel. The instruments and musicians, who wore earplugs and used click tracks to hear each other and themselves, were arranged from the lowest pitch (Caccese) to the highest (Rosenbaum), and in turn, the music moved from the lowest pitched sounds to the highest pitched. The musicians and CMNW figured this configuration would create the best blend and synthesis. And certainly both happened.

Even if the musicians stood apart, they were not alone. They were surrounded on all sides by listeners, except in the space behind the risers’ audience. They were enveloped, and from percussive whispers to thunderous drumming to the diminishing tinkling bell sounds emerging from the glockenspiel, an unfolding and enfolding drama took place.

Much thought was put into the arrangement of the musicians, the instruments — and the audience. Some patrons sat on the stage, some on the floor (in chairs), some on risers. The closer you were to a musician, the more you heard of his music, of course. If you were farther up in the risers, you heard more of the entire room. “The Kaul is such a live space,” Rosenbaum said in an email after the concert.

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Sometimes, the music sounded like thunder; other times, like rain, the ocean, the mountain wind–or, as Adams explained, “the wildfires, superstorms and tides of darkness rising all around us.” The work transports listeners into nature, a world that Adams knows humans are destroying. The music is more an experience than a performance, “like time-lapse photography,” Sandbox percussionist Allen said before the piece began.

“The sound rises continuously out of the earth with rumbling bass drums, and up to the sky, in high simmering bell tones. It’s an idea I’ve had for 50 years, and Prophecies is the closest I’ve come to realize it,” Adams explained in the program notes.

Foremost interpreters

Adams met Sandbox several years ago when they performed his Strange and Sacred Noise, songbirdsongs, and bells remembered and Inuksuit. He fell for their percussive language though he has composed for many other instruments and media. “I’ve come to regard these four young men as the foremost interpreters of my music,” he said.

Sandbox performed Andy Akiho’s Grammy Award-nominated Seven Pillars and George Crumb’s American Songbook II – “A Journey Beyond Time” two summers ago at CMNW concerts. In those pieces, they used everything from a Home Depot saw to a whiskey bottle to create and fill out a sound landscape. The percussion in Prophecies was much more standard. 

These stunning collaborations, along with others–including another CMNW world premiere, Joan Tower’s To Sing or Dance, performed on July 14 and 15 this season–have shaped the quartet’s growth, Rosenbaum said.

For me, the piece was intensely emotional and I was there, in nature, in the fragile burning world. The simplicity of Prophecies’ musical structure leaves space for a huge emotional response. “The piece, like so much of John’s music, creates an atmosphere, an environment. It puts you into a trance,” Rosenbaum said, and suggested to me: “It sounds like you used that space to reflect on the state of our ever-changing world.”

Well, yes.

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I left the Kaul, mesmerized. There was a slight breeze stirring up the steamy evening heat as I returned to my car to drive home. I didn’t think the world would burn up, but if it did or does, Adams’ music is an ideal accompaniment. And, of course, I hope Sandbox plays it. After all, these brilliant musicians had pretty much memorized it.