There is something very elemental about the music of John Luther Adams, and witnessing Become Ocean live made a very strong impression. Listening to it literally repoints your brain, as I discovered back in 2018 with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
“Over the years my orchestral music has become simpler and more expansive.
Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95) contains four different musical textures. In the White Silence (1998) has three. For Lou Harrison (2002) reduces this to just two.
In Dark Waves (2007), I finally got to one. When I first heard that piece I began to wonder if I could sustain a similar sound for a longer span of time. The result is Become Ocean, a meditation on the vast, deep and mysterious tides of existence.
The title is borrowed from a mesostic verse that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison’s birthday. Likening Harrison’s music to a river in delta, Cage writes:
LiStening to it we becOme oceaN.
Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. And as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”
I have always admired the ability of Anthony Gonzalez to paint expansive musical pictures in his work as main writer for M83. However he is an extremely effective ambient writer too, as he showed on the largely instrumental release Digital Shades Vol. 1 in 2007, writing almost completely without beats. Coloring The Void is a completely unhurried example from the album’s core, scaling the peaks of euphoria as it progresses:
The work of Andrew Weatherall is greatly missed, not least because he managed to include so many different forms and genres in his writing. We don’t always associate him with ambient music, but Sabres of Paradise, the group he was part of with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, wrote an absolute beauty with this heat-soaked track:
A full appreciation of the visionary producer William Orbit will follow tomorrow, but for now here is one of the most effective tracks from his album recasting classical music, Pieces in a Modern Style. In it he takes two of Henryk Górecki‘s Pieces in the Old Style, of which this is the first:
Federica Lombardi (soprano), Chiara Amarù (mezzo-soprano), Dave Monaco (tenor), Nicola Ulivieri (bass), Epiphoni Consort, BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra / Nil Venditti
Respighi Church Windows (Vetrate di chiesa) (1925-26) Rossini Stabat Mater (1831-1841)
Royal Albert Hall, London Friday 7 August 2026
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Photos (c) BBC / Mark Allan
Friday night is Italian night at the BBC Proms, it would seem. Two weeks after John Wilson’s blistering account of Respighi’s Roman Trilogy, we had a sequel of sorts headed by Italian-Turkish conductor Nil Venditti, marshalling a double bill from Respighi and Rossini, a composer he much admired.
As we heard two weeks back, Respighi was no shrinking violet when writing for orchestra, a point reemphasised by this first Proms performance of Church Windows. This is the sort of orchestral music on which the Royal Albert Hall thrives – descriptive, colourful, bold, brash in places but beautifully controlled in others. One of these moments was Adam Lee’s clarinet solo, exquisitely spun.
Less obviously demonstrative than the Roman poems, Church Windows nonetheless softened the heart with its invocations of Gregorian chants and chorales, woven into Respighi’s writing. Not all were successful in performance, the horn theme of San Michele Arcangelo taking a while to align with Venditti’s tempo, but this movement grew into a tumultuous finish, the tam-tam describing Satan’s fall from heaven. A tender account of Il mattutino di Santa Chiara (The Matins of St Clare) found the BBC SO woodwind on fine form, but the finale, San Gregorio Magno (St Gregory the Great) carried all before it, Richard Pearce’s barnstorming organ solo briefly smothering the orchestra before a brilliantly manoeuvred climax. Once again, the ears were ringing, and while this may not have registered so highly on the Richter scale, it was nonetheless a qualified triumph.
Rossini’s Stabat Mater is similarly unconventional. Its long gestation period would suggest a creative block, but the final composition, finished after a decade, is a profound utterance. Venditti kept things moving here, and with an evident love for the piece, from the solemn choral intoning of the Stabat mater dolorosa itself, through the sequence of arias which found the soloists taking a little while to adjust to the acoustic of the hall. A healthy balance was found, though bass Nicola Ulivieri, a commanding presence, was appreciably louder than his three colleagues – each of whom were dramatic in their responses to the text. Tenor Dave Monaco nailed his top notes with impressive precision in the Cujus animam gementem, soprano Federica Lombardi was bright and commendably unforced with the chorus throughout Inflammatus et accensus, while mezzo-soprano Chiara Amarù shone in the Fac, ut portem Christi mortem.
Yet the real stars of this performance were the London-based Epiphoni Consort, making their Proms debut, and the BBC Symphony Chorus, both extremely well drilled and of one voice. The antiphonal exchanges of ‘Paradisi gloria’ in the Quando corpus morietur section were memorable, but the crowning glory was the ‘Amen’ finale, where Rossini – and the charismatic Venditti – let loose in the thrilling tour de force of powerful counterpoint. A special mention for timpanist Antoine Bedewi, too, whose role throughout was critical. This was the choir’s to bring home, however, and they delivered with style and panache, convincing audience and listeners of Rossini’s original inspiration and dramatic instinct. A refreshingly different Prom, and how good to hear two less familiar but deserving works in performances that made them shine.
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