Sonorities

Just a bit more about John Adams's opera Nixon In China: the scoring in terms of instrumental voices is wonderful, but I cannot stand the use of the synthesiser at the end of the first Pat Nixon scene in the second act. It sounds so cheesy, so eighties (musically a low, dishonest decade if ever there was one.) I don't know if this is deliberate, a kind of ironic comment on the president's wife's abundance of sentimentality, but I somehow doubt this. (It's the humanity and nobility of the sentiment that are genuinely touching.) In contrast the use of the saxophone section is superbly inventive. In the second half of the opera they are frequently used to evoke a sense of the big band sound (Miller rather than Ellington) and its attendant nostalgia (rightly for both Chinese and American characters.) The music is never far away from a bit of a chuckle.

Best sound heard today: a tiny bird perched on one of the trees that thrust upward in the central space of the new block in school with a voice a hundred times bigger than itself rendering a tune or two from its songbook. Nice!