What we have here is one of my all-time favourite pieces, at times bombastic and other times blissful, but always a technical sight to behold.
Today I’ll just be cracking open the first fifty bars to get a little glimpse of some of Adam’s orchestration, harmonic and rhythmic ideas.
We begin with an emphatic and harassing, homophonic stampede from the low winds, brass (bar trombone 1 and tuba 2), timpani and piano. This seemingly incessant hammering of the same chord lasts for 16 bars. Furthermore, every note in this wind/brass block is marked staccatissimo on this first page – just to further hammer this idea home.