St. Louis Symphony Music Director David Robertson “has been an unstinting advocate for new work,” writes David Allen in Sunday’s (3/26) New York Times. “Above all, he has championed music by John Adams, whose [Passion oratorio] ‘The Gospel According to the Other Mary’ Mr. Robertson brings to Carnegie Hall on Friday.… Q: How does ‘The Gospel’ fit into John Adams’s development? Robertson: John is always a dramatic composer. This inherent drama, which can be on a minute level if you look at something like ‘China Gates’ for piano, can also be expanded to huge ruptures in a work of larger size. It’s almost as though we’re looking at the same process, but it’s a question of the magnification of our aural lens. In ‘The Gospel According to the Other Mary,’ that allows him to use … his wonderful ability for contemplating the otherworldly, spiritual qualities that instrumental music without words can provide. Q: The work mixes the spiritual with the political. Robertson: The way that John looks at these things, and it’s been largely influenced in his work over decades with Peter Sellars, is that you can’t really separate the political and the spiritual.”
Posted March 27, 2017
Pictured: David Robertson leads the St. Louis Symphony
