It's all Adams in New World concert Saturday

BY LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON

lajohnson@MiamiHerald.com

Composer John Adams.

» More Photos

IF YOU GO

What: Composer John Adams conducts the New World Symphony in an all-Adams program featuring Slonimsky's Earbox, The Doctor Atomic Symphony and The Dharma at Big Sur with electric violin soloist Tracy Silverman

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Lincoln Theatre, 541 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach

Tickets: $15

Info: 305-673-3331; www.nws.edu.

John Adams may be the most prolific of composers, but he takes his rare vacation time seriously. There is no cell phone reception at his forest retreat in northern Sonoma though he can check e-mail on his neighbor's modem line when absolutely necessary.

''I apologize for being hard to reach,'' he writes in an e-mail. ``I don't spend a lot of time on the phone when here, but it does cause problems from time to time -- like right now!''

Adams -- for many, the finest American composer of his generation -- will return to South Florida for a one-night stand with the New World Symphony Saturday. He will conduct the orchestra in an all-Adams program featuring Slonimsky's Earbox, the Doctor Atomic Symphony and The Dharma at Big Sur, his electric-violin concerto, with soloist Tracy Silverman.

Speaking on a neighbor's phone, Adams explains that after a month of travel and working on his first book, Hallelujah Junction, he had been taking a few days off and relishing the more mundane physical labors of the northern Sonoma woods. ''I was just out with the chainsaw this morning,'' Adams says. ``Me and George Bush.''

The Doctor Atomic Symphony is the most recent work on Adams' New World program, a large orchestral canvas adapted from his 2005 opera of the same title about nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

WIDE INFLUENCES

But in many ways, The Dharma at Big Sur is the composer's most fascinating and representative work, drawing on a characteristically wide range of influences, unorthodox in instrumentation and infused with a rock-like sonic punch and heavy-metal intensity in the final pages.

Commissioned for the openingof Disney Concert Hall, Dharma takes its inspiration from typically heterogeneous sources: Jack Kerouac, the composer's feelings about being a Pacific coast ''emigrant'' and the epic grandeur of Big Sur.

Originally, Adams considered writing a narrative work, but that plan changed when he heard Silverman playing his six-string electric violin at an Oakland jazz club.

A Juilliard graduate who had forsaken the classical world for a repertoire of rock, jazz, blues and world music, Silverman has adopted a distinctive style that freely mixes Indian raga, Stephane Grappelli and Terry Riley, with a touch of Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix.

The 27-minute Dharma at Big Sur is cast in two large sections, each inspired by a West Coast composer. ''A New Day,'' is a long, rhapsodic solo for the violinist, proceeding from unearthly stillness to raga-like wails against a hypnotic meditative accompaniment, the Lou Harrison tribute palpable in the sound of distant gongs and harps.

In the second part, ''Sri Moonshine,'' Minimalist pioneer Riley's influence is clear as the insistent, jagged theme for solo violin becomes increasingly elaborate, soaring up and down over a hard-driving orchestral accompaniment. As the amped fiddle line becomes ever more virtuosic and complex, the orchestra builds to a blasting quadruple fortissimo in one of the most thrilling moments in all of Adams' output.

''The more I play it the more it startles me just how beautiful it is,'' Silverman says, ``and how incredibly understated in so many ways.''

The violinist believes his improvisational style attracted Adams to write the piece with him in mind.

''The first time I played the piece, I felt like I was playing something I had written,'' Silverman says. ``It felt so native to me.''

Still, that initial performance was not without difficulties. In a hectic week of several opening concerts with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic having much music to prepare, the first rehearsal turned ominous.

Adams' original plan for Dharma was to instill an unusual world-music feel by having the soloist and orchestra use ''just intonation'' -- in which intervals between the notes are precisely tuned to a scrupulously worked-out scheme rather than the more approximate style of traditional Western tuning.

With time short, the composer's plan collided head on with musical reality at the first rehearsal.

''The whole situation was rather tense,'' Adams recalls. ''It was the second night of the hall's opening week, and there was a huge amount of music for them to get through.'' Adams realized that due to variances in instruments' tonal qualities, brass in particular, his just intonation was inherently unworkable and had to be abandoned.

HYBRID COMPROMISE

The compromise is ''a hybrid,'' in which those instruments that can be exactly tuned use just intonation, and the rest use traditional, approximate tuning.

''It's not an absolute perfect laboratory, but it's a very unique sound. I'm very pleased with it,'' the composer says.

Yet considering its fraught premiere, Dharma is quickly gaining in popularity with other violinists, a fact that brings the composer great pride.

''I consider the piece the ugly duckling that grew up to be a swan,'' he says.

There was some degree of complication for the soloist as well.

The concerto is written in B major, which, as Silverman notes, ''is not a real violin-friendly key. There were no open strings anywhere in the piece. I realized that after the premiere.'' For the second performance, and with Adams' permission, Silverman tuned his instrument to C, which makes playing it more manageable and is the way he always performs Dharma now.

''I tune my violin down a half-step so it sounds in B, but I'm playing it in C,'' Silverman says. ''The whole point of it was so that I could use different fingerings, use open strings, different harmonics, all these things.'' The adaptation gives his instrument a haunting, dark, almost Baroque color.

Technical issues apart, Silverman says his interpretive approach to the concerto has changed from the first few performances when he consciously emphasized a populist style with hard-edged attacks and plenty of feedback and electric-violin grit.

''I thought I was going to interject all these rock and jazz sounds, and at first they were maybe willfully imposed on it,'' Silverman says. ``When I first performed the piece I felt a certain obligation to play this role as a performer -- to be iconoclastic and rebellious.''

Silverman says he has relaxed his approach, still playing with full-throttle intensity but now looking at Dharma more objectively than as just a solo showcase opportunity.

''I allow myself to engage with the whole work as much as possible and disappear as a performer and reappear as a voice that serves the combined sound,'' Silverman says. ``I keep finding that the voice of the solo part is actually even more iconoclastic than I imagined -- it's already in there.''

DISTINCTIVE STYLE

Silverman finds himself continually enamored by the work that his distinctive style inspired.

''There's a purity about it,'' Silverman says. 'I started practicing yesterday, and I thought, `It's Miles Davis!' It's like Miles blowing that note with no vibrato. Just that purity, with no wasted notes. It gives me an incredible sense of freedom to play it. All the music that I love and I always thought was not allowed to be part of the classical tradition is in it.

``John has found a way to make this abstract and bring in all these folk, vernacular and world-music elements.''

Adams looks forward to completing a composition for the St. Lawrence String Quartet -- after first getting his fill of cutting, clearing away and burning more Sonoma brush.

''I wrote so many huge pieces for so long and always on an immovable deadline, I'm just going a little easy now,'' the composer says. 'My wife said the other day, `You're not going to putter around the house, are you?' I thought 'Uh-oh! I better get back to work.' ''

The cad and the witch: James Hewitt's affair with a sex-obsessed clairvoyant

Comments (9)

First, in 1994, came Princess In Love - a gratuitous account of his affair with Diana, which earned him a reported share of £100,000.

His autobiography, Love And War, followed in 1999 and four years ago yet another book, Moving On, which amounted to little more than a regurgitation of the same old stories for yet another fee.

Scroll down for more...

Aramis Fuster: 'An expert at making love potions'

So it is befitting that the woman who has thrust him back into the spotlight is a minor Spanish celebrity with an even greater thirst for the rewards of fame.

She materialised - I use the word advisedly, since she also says she is the world's only true witch - to give an account, complete with florid details, of what she claims was their ten-week affair.

It's quite some story. The woman, Aramis Fuster, said she was introduced to Hewitt by mutual friends in Marbella, where Hewitt now lives.

"It was lust at first sight," she says. "We chatted and flirted all night, and the sexual tension was overwhelming.

"I make love potions - but there was no need to with James. When the friend who introduced us left, he sat me down and started pawing all over me, kissing me on the neck and mouth."

According to her, the pair "really got to know each other" in a "secluded wooded layby by the beach. The windows [of the car] got so steamed up, I had to wipe them with a hanky before we could drive off."

There was more to come: "One night we even risked doing it in the swimming pool at the complex I live in," she said.

She also discussed her preference for "tantric sex" - the ability to last for hours - which she says can happen, with the aid of her special "magic mirror", when two people are in a different room or even country.

Scroll down for more...

James Hewitt with Diana: He once showed so much promise

All toe-curling stuff. But it's when you look at the photographs of Hewitt (coppery now, quiff thinning) and Aramis (stout and brash) that you realise quite what a comedown this is for the former tank squadron commander who served in Iraq and once romanced a princess.

And the more you learn about Aramis Fuster, the more unsavoury the whole story becomes.

She describes herself as the leading world authority on occultism. In Spain, she is a familiar face thanks to her many appearances on tabloid TV and in down-market magazines.

She has written three books, sagely explaining, among other things, that she had her first paranormal experience aged three, and that the Devil tried to take her son (now aged 20) from her when she was pregnant.

Her preposterous claims only underscore how far she is prepared to sink in exchange for the money and publicity she so obviously craves.

Aramis says that as the world's only Christian witch, she can break any evil spell with her white magic. She makes personalised potions and claims to have cured cancer and halted the onset of Aids in patients.

At the start of this year, she predicted on Spanish TV that Rodriguez Zapatero - now in his second term as Prime Minister - would lose this year's general election.

As for her age, by Aramis's own account she is now 688 years old - which would mean she was born in 1320. She claims to be on her seventh life after a series of reincarnations, and that she has twice been burned at the stake.

A likelier story is that Aramis - whose real name is reported to be Maria Antonia Perez Sanchez - was born in Catalunya in North-East Spain in October 1954, making her 53.

It was in Catalunya that she made her first TV appearances, predicting things such as the wedding of the heir to the throne, Prince Felipe.

Over the years, though, her outlandish behaviour soon led to her being described as a "friki" - freak. On a popular TV programme in Spain, she once announced that she'd come up with a magic formula to make it rain in Miami.

She also said that during a stay there she had created another magic spell that would increase the size of local women's breasts and the circumference of men's penises.

Why, then, asked one reporter, had she not put her powers to better use and tried to end Third World hunger or conflict in Iraq? Straight-faced, Aramis replied: "All they've got to do is ask!"

But it was her "attempted suicide" in July last year that is widely seen as Aramis's most distasteful grab at publicity. Initially it was reported that she had swallowed 70 pills and given herself four insulin injections.

Aramis later claimed she had downed 300 pills after a year of illtreatment at the hands of her Cuban ex-husband Yaemil, showing pictures of bruises on her body as proof that the abuse took place, though none of the pictures actually showed her face.

Keen as ever to air her feelings, Aramis then appeared on national television to discuss it.

One reason many believe the entire thing was a colourfully choreographed stunt was that Aramis had trailed the event with a TV announcement, fainting into the arms of a reporter after telling her: "I feel the right not to have to put up with any more and die when I want."

In one bust-up on national television, Yaemil and Aramis traded one-word insults for nearly a minute, and Aramis ripped up her marriage certificate and wedding photographs, took off her dress, and finished the interview in her underwear.

So she turned to Hewitt for comfort. Aramis tells friends the pair had been making plans to move in together - but after being caught by the paparazzi, Hewitt seems to have cooled the relationship.

So what of Hewitt? He first began complaining that there was "nothing" for him in Britain four years ago, after being arrested on suspicion of possessing cocaine. He was later let off with a caution.

After a run-in with the Inland Revenue because he had failed to fill in several years' of tax forms, he set up home in Spain. There, he appears to have replicated the existence he once enjoyed in London's Fulham.

In Spain, he is invited to the sort of parties covered in local lifestyle magazines and often eats out at bars and restaurants along the Golden Mile between Marbella and Puerto Banus.

"He's got a different lady on his arm every night," says one socialite. "The Spanish often can't place his face, but he doesn't need any introduction among Marbella's well-heeled expat community."

Until recently, he rented an apartment in the same Puerto Banus complex as ex-footballer-turned-pundit Andy Gray, but is now thought to be living in the hills above San Pedro.

When he first moved to Spain, he hoped to open a sports bar. He is now said to be fronting a bid by a group of Irish businessmen to buy popular Marbella nightspot, Loft.

He has assimilated only a little into local ways - "He doesn't speak much Spanish and prefers French if he's with someone who can't speak English," says one local.

All in all, it's a rather sad existence - albeit spiced up by encounters with witches - for the once-swashbuckling former Life Guard for whom life seemed to promise so much.

ADVERTISEMENT

Iconocast is about learning and teaching without borders; we offer eMarketing, Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Online Branding, and eMarketing News Services.

Iconocast Home Page

Contact Iconocast

Iconocast Health Articles

© 2003-07. ICONOCAST is a trademark of iconocast.com.