El Dorado by John Adams

El Dorado (1996)

John Adams's El Dorado is in some ways program music, with a twist. It's an imaginary accompaniment, he writes in the liner essay, to a diptych with the unmolested nature of the New World in one panel and that same world with man in it in the other panel. Certainly Adams's characterization of the piece's drama is apt, as it indeed bursts with fierceness at exactly the point where man comes to believe in dominating and subjugating nature, where any hint of the romantic tradition crashes headlong into a more radical revision of both minimalism and percussion-charged late-20th-century orchestration. The piece is aimed at the same subject occupying so many composers in 1992, the collision of worlds 500 years earlier in the Americas. Adams follows this big, broad-shouldered work with an orchestration of Franz Liszt's La Lugubre Gondola and a reduced arrangement of Ferruccio Busoni's Berceuse Élégiaque. Both are funereal works, elegiac in their temperament and brimming with a dramatic depth that compliments El Dorado's rises and crashing falls beautifully. --Andrew Bartlett

minimal

1. El Dorado: Part I - A Dream of Gold 12:40
2. El Dorado: Part II - Soledades 16:17
3. Berceuse elegiaque (des Mannes Wiegenlied am Sarge seiner Mutter) 8:16
4. The Black Gondola 9:48