“Julia Wolfe (b.1958) was probably too young to have experienced a full dose of the upheaval [of the 1960s] firsthand, but in her new 33-minute symphonic extravaganza Flower Power, she strives to re-create it,” writes Richard S. Ginell in Monday’s (1/21) Musical America (subscription required). “The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic … and featured the Bang On A Can All-Stars (of which Wolfe is a founder) as a kind of a countercultural core group within the orchestra. Designer Jeff Sugg provided the visual element.… Philharmonic Creative Chair John Adams was on the podium, leading what amounted to one big symphonic juggernaut Saturday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall…. The opening … evolved into a long, sustained yet harmonically unstable chord, with stray notes sliding around and the All-Stars in a furious non-stop frenzy.… It seemed an apt metaphor for the 1960s.… A jingling simulated jam session for the All-Stars, easily the most attractive music in the piece, accompanied the famous photo of a war protestor sticking a flower in the rifle of a soldier … It was an emotionally moving conclusion.” Also on the program was Adams’s 1998 Naive and Sentimental Music, which the LA Phil had commissioned.
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