After reporting yesterday on Dutilleux’s Correspondances with the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, I made the trip up to Baltimore in the pursuit of new music. In this case, it was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance of John Adams‘s On the Transmigration of Souls at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. It is the most celebrated work of music written to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, as well as a 2005 Grammy for the recording made by the New York Philharmonic. As the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, audience and critical reaction to Adams’s piece — so powerful at its first performance, by all reports — is evolving. So, I was glad to get a chance at last to hear the work in a live performance.

Guest conductor Carlos Kalmar led the amassed performing forces, with the Concert Artists of the Baltimore Symphonic Chorale and the large Peabody Children’s Chorus in the choir stands behind and in the side balconies on either side of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Kalmar’s first gesture was to cue the prerecorded tape prepared by Mark Grey. At first, all we hear are the sounds of a normal city’s song, busy streets, sirens, and the click of people’s shoes as they walk down the sidewalk. Soon, a boy’s voice begins the piece’s first ostinato, repeating the word “Missing,” followed by a litany of victims’ names. These “concrete” sounds are then interwoven with the wash of performed sound, beginning with women’s voices on an “oo” vowel and gentle string chords. Much of the piece unfolds with the effect of Klangfarbenmelodie, a pulsating mass of sound out of which harmonic colors surge and recede, not unlike what you see when staring at a stained glass window.