Product Description
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Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and described by the
New Yorker's Alex Ross as "...the loveliest apocalypse in musical
history," John Luther Adams' majestic orchestral work Become
Ocean is a thrilling exploration of depth, turbulence, eerie
silence and ultimately enveloping calm. Performed by the Seattle
Symphony under the baton of Ludovic Morlot, the music casts an
expressive arc that's by turns and expansive - an ebbing
and flowing sonic journey that finds the composer testing the
very limits of his imagination.
Review
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With their first collaboration, Ludovic Morlot, the Seattle
Symphony Orchestra and composer John Luther Adams have struck
gold. Become Ocean, Morlot's first large-scale commission as
music director of the SSO, is a symphonic work that feels even
vaster than its forty-two-minute span. By dividing the large
ensemble into three interlocking orchestras, Adams created a
score that works on multiple levels: it's an abstract sonic
experience at one extreme and, at the other, an evocation of
nature and its irresistible force. --Thomas May, Listen Magazine
"This is the piece of classical music of 2014 that has crossed
over to a mainstream audience, and rightly so. Put it on speakers
and people will stop what they're doing to say, "What is this? I
love it!" Written as a meditation on rising - and ultimately
all-consuming - tides, Adams has created a work that is both an
orchestral showpiece (written, actually, for three juxtaposed
mini-orchestras) and a completely haunting inner journey. The
Seattle Symphony should be hugely proud of having commissioned
Become Ocean and their stellar performance under conductor
Ludovic Morlot." --Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR 2014
"I never thought I would pick a Pulitzer Prize-winning
composition for the top spot on my end-of-year list. For as long
as I can remember, the Pulitzer judges focused on pleasing a
niche group of academics who care more about "compositional
strategies" than how music actually sounds. But contemporary
classical music has changed, and the field is now spawning many
appealing and genre-bending works. John Luther Adams lives up to
the title of his composition, capturing an oceanic torrent of
sound in an awe-inspiring performance. (Also check out the
previous year's Pulitzer winner Caroline Shaw's "Partita for 8
Voices" for another example of the new populist movement in the
classical world.)" --Ted Gioia, The Daily Beast
New York Times, Classical Best of 2014: Inwardly mechanical and
outwardly entrancing, "Become Ocean," the 2014 Pulitzer
Prize-winning work, was intended to drown you in sound, and it
succeeds. This absorbing, glittering release is testament to what
a single piece can do for a composer, an orchestra and a
conductor.
-David Allen, New York Times 2014
New York Times, Fall Preview, 2014: Advancing in great orchestral
heaves and sighs, this 40-minute work by the Alaskan composer
John Luther Adams, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony and its
music director, Ludovic Morlot, won this year's Pulitzer Prize in
Music. By that time it had already been recorded in Seattle, and
is scheduled for release just as the new season gets underway.
Cantaloupe Music.
--New York Times, September 2014
"In a letter to the orchestra's director, Ludovic Morlot, Taylor
Swift explained that she was moved to donate after hearing a
of John Luther Adams' Become Ocean, commissioned and
performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by
Morlot. Adams has received widespread critical accl for his
work; The Telegraph's Ivan Hewett has described the "innocent and
visionary" musician as "one of America's most important
composers." --Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph.co.uk, December
4, 2015