Tenderness towards strangers
John Adams, the most successful and award-winning composers of contemporary classical music in the US, is proud of his exceptionally quiet work. The Wound-Dresser will now be heard at Helsinki Festival.
Text: Suna Vuori
Image: Deborah O’Grady
When John Adams composed a new work in 1989, he had two concerns on his mind.
One was his father’s advanced Alzheimer’s, which caused much work and grief for his mother, who was a caregiver. The second was the AIDS crisis that had spread to the United States and in which a large number of young men, many of them homosexuals, died.
“These concerns were at work in the background,” Adams says by phone from California, “when I picked up excerpts about bandaging wounds and treating dying soldiers from Walt Whitman‘s poem (1869) of the same title.”
American journalist and writer Walt Whitman went to Washington D.C., where he did voluntary work caring for the wounded in hospitals during the American Civil War. Based on these experiences, he wrote a total of three collections of poems and a number of essays.
Care and tenderness towards strangers are at the heart of Adams’ composition.
“When I listen to it now and compare it to, let’s say, my more upbeat works, such as Nixon in China or Harmonielehre, it’s clear that The Wound-Dresser is very different – quiet, lyrical and melancholic. I’m actually pretty proud that I was able to compose it!”
John Adams went through a period of intense creativity in the late 1980s, and his operatic and orchestral works made him famous in contemporary music circles in the Western world. He initially became known as a minimalist, but around this time he was taking his expression in new directions.
“There was much talk about style at the time, and it was usually approached in a purist way: you were either a minimalist or this, that or the other. If I have had any influence on younger composers, I hope I have been able to show that a composer can quite easily move from one form of expression to another. That’s what great, well-known composers, such as Beethoven or Mahler, did.”
What does Adams himself think of The Wound-Dresser‘s message in this day and age?
“I don’t really know what to say. Of course, I’m glad that it is being performed so much now, and I often receive very touching feedback on it. People feel it is important to convey how much it has meant to them. Many fine young singers have performed it.”
Adams is clearly reluctant to talk about the political situation in the United States.
“Well. Those of us who live here think about it incessantly, all the time. We don’t know what’s going to happen – and it’s very disturbing and scary, too.”
The composer tells about a former student who now lives in Helsinki and plans to apply for Finnish citizenship.
Adams himself plans to come to Finland next year, as a follow-up to his visit to Lahti in 2021, when he conducted his orchestral composition Harmonielehre as part of Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s Fokus concert series.
“It was fun! The orchestra is great and the concert hall is simply perfect. The musicians were warm, and I think the concert was really successful. I enjoyed it very much, so I’m really happy to go back there.”
Adams also says that as a teenager his son Samuel loved the recording of Sibelius’ 7th Symphony by Osmo Vänskä and Lahti Symphony Orchestra. Samuel Adams is himself an acclaimed composer.
“Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a simply magnificent premiere of his piano concerto No Such Spring. It’s a difficult work, but it turned out to be one of the finest performances I’ve ever heard.”
Adams is clearly living a new period of strong creativity and has recently expanded his extensive output with several works.
The opera Antony and Cleopatra, which was completed during the pandemic and premiered in San Francisco, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in May.
In January, Adams’ third piano concerto, After the Fall, premiered in San Francisco, with Víkingur Ólafsson as the soloist.
March last year saw the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, premiere Adams’ 18-minute orchestral work Frenzy. Also a new piece for Adams’ good friend, conductor Marin Alsop, was recently completed.
John Adams is now writing a string quartet, which will be premiered at the Ojai Music Festival in California in summer 2026. The Festival’s artistic director next year is Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is also a friend of Adams.
At the Helsinki Festival’s The Unseen and the Seen – Music from the USA concert, the Finnish premiere of The Wound-Dresser in its Finnish translation, Lääkintämies, will be performed on August 16, 2025. The concert will be conducted by Susanna Mälkki, with Ville Rusanen as the soloist. Read more about the concert.