New York City. (Concerts And Recitals).(Concert Review)

The New York Philharmonic made a bid to return from the fringes of the city's cultural life with its first subscription concert of the season. On the Transmigration of Souls, a commissioned work by John Adams, received its premiere on September 19, a bit over a year after the terrorist attacks to which it responds. Wisely, Adams makes no attempt to portray or interpret the events. Instead, he offers what might fairly be termed a meditation on the aftermath. The experience began with taped sounds of city life, as if the listener had wandered into a garden or an empty church. The taped sounds, heard throughout from speakers placed antiphonally in the hall, gradually came to include spoken names of the victims. Onstage, the large orchestra was joined by a large chorus (New York Choral Artists) and a children's chorus (the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, performing from memory), who sang texts taken from many sources: a flight attendant's last cellular phone call, posters of the missing, reminiscences by family members.

A description may raise the idea of questionable taste, but the effect was not cheap. Adams offered a deferential and decent response to grief. The taped recitation of specific names quietly moved to archetypes ("my brother," "my daughter") soon juxtaposed with the word "missing," while the chorus gradually moved from wordless sounds to the word "remember." Violent catastrophe is experienced only in two flashbacks. The first is bearable, but the second is deliberately searing and uncomfortably long. Here, the chorus forced listeners to think about the many contexts of the word "light." But Adams gave consolation, as ...