John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind Reviewed

Source: The New York Times.

It’s no wonder that birdsong should be central to the work of John Luther Adams, a composer and environmental activist whose music often draws inspiration from the unspoiled Arctic wilderness that he has fought to preserve. Throughout the ’70s he worked on “songbirdsongs,” a cycle that translates his own field observations into crystalline instrumental miniatures for flutes and percussion. Later works sometimes incorporated ornithological quotations, like the different types of thrushes heard in “A Northern Suite.”

On Saturday the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Mr. Adams’s “Canticles of the Holy Wind,” a hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong through human — but wordless — voices. The exquisite chamber choir the Crossing, which commissioned “Canticles” together with another ensemble, performed the hourlong suite in the museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall.