PRESS EXCERPTS

Contemporary Music Forum, Squeezing Plenty In
By Tim Page, The Washington Post, September 9, 2005

"Adam Silverman, born in 1973, was the youngest composer on the program -- indeed, almost six decades Perle's junior. "Ricochet," for viola, clarinet and piano, is a graceful, melodic, mostly consonant piece, shot through with easy charm. Had I not been told that Silverman was a New Yorker, I would have pegged him as Parisian; if Francois Truffaut were alive and working today, "Ricochet" would have made a lovely score for one of his romances. Violist James Stern and clarinetist David Jones joined Andrist in an eager, affectionate performance."

A presença judaica na ópera: argumentos e AUTORES
By Sergio Casoy, A Hebraica (São Paulo, Brazil)

Ainda é importante mencionar uma ópera em estágio final de composição que já teve, porém, seus dois primeiros atos apresentados em Nova York em 2004 e que todos aguardam com ansiedade. Trata-se de Korczak’s Orphans ("Os Órfãos de Korczak"), da autoria do compositor norte-americano Adam Silverman, nascido em 1973. Korczak’s Orphans retrata a heróica saga de Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), pseudônimo do judeu polonês Henryk Goldszmit, o destemido médico e professor que dirigiu um orfanato em pleno gueto de Varsóvia, protegendo duzentas crianças até sua deportação e assassinato em Treblinka.

Translation from Portuguese: "It is important to mention an opera in its final period of composition that already had, however, its two first acts presented in New York in 2004 and that all await with anxiety. This is "Korczak's Orphans," by North American composer Adam Silverman, born in 1973. "Korczak's Orphans" portrays the heroic Saga of Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), pseudonym of the Polish Jew Henryk Goldszmit, the doctor and professor who directed an orphanage inside the ghetto of Warsaw , protecting two hundred children until their deportation and murder in Treblinka."

If Operas Can Make it Here...
By Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, June 6, 2004

"The score for "Korczak's Orphans" by Adam Silverman, a New York composer who has written concert works and operas as well as rock-infused music with electronics, raised different issues [than Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner]. The opera, to a libretto by Susan Gubernat, tells a true story. In 1942, a Jewish doctor, army officer, teacher and director of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto was forced by the Nazis to take children under his care on a train bound for Treblinka. The music of Act II, performed complete, was pulsing, glitteringly orchestrated and harmonically pungent. The work is already capable of reaching people, to judge from the enthusiasm of the audience." [download a pdf of the full article]

Strata Offers Layers of Musical Styles
By Carol Furtwangler, The Charleston Post and Courier, June 6, 2004

"Always exciting for both performers and audience is the presence of the composer whose music is on the program. Saturday at First (Scots) Presbyterian Church, Piccolo Spoleto shone the spotlight on not one but two composers who have written works for Strata, a trio of piano, violin/viola and clarinet. Both composers were on site. The balance achieved by this particular, even peculiar, set of contrasting instruments is reflected in this group's programming."

"The world premiere of "Ricochet" by American composer Adam B. Silverman is an attempt, he explained, to create a sound suggesting people from different places speaking one language with different accents.Taking advantage of James Stern's expertise on viola, Silverman wrote a lively, bouncy piece with the ricochet technique of throwing the bow on the strings of the instrument, with the sound echoed on Audrey Andrist's piano and Nathan Williams' clarinet. He accomplished his goal of "sound bouncing off the walls."

Caught in the Act: eighth blackbird plays Minimum Security Collective
By Deborah Kravetz, Sequenza 21, February 03-10, 2003

Someone had the good sense to move this performance into the small Prince Theater instead of the cavernous Zellerbach it was scheduled for, and by golly, it was almost completely filled for this program of sixteen short movements from four commissioned pieces by the Minimum Security Composers Collective: Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno, to put them in their alphabetic order. The commission elicited movements that could be performed in any order, and eighth blackbird pulled them together into two seamless movements based on what the music suggested to them as relevant transitions...

Does this make it more difficult to get to know a composer, or is it a challenge to merely tell one from another? I don't know what this format does to the music itself, and it takes the ear a while, but eventually, one can discern the similarities among the excerpts.

Most evidently, I found myself relaxing into the lyric romanticism of In Another Man's Skin by Adam Silverman, especially the waltz-y (schmaltzy) Cover Tune. Silverman takes advantage of the ensemble's instrumentation for violin, cello, flute, clarinet and marimba, using dance-like tempi, rippling runs and shimmering effects from the marimba to create flowing melodic lines...

The Wallace Stevens poem [Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, for which the ensemble Eighth Blackbird is named] also addresses questions of perception that were a central issue of Friday's concert: how is our understanding of a piece of music affected by the way we look at it? Four young composers who style themselves the Minimum Security Composers Collective wrote autonomous, four-movement pieces, generally thoughtful and lively, from Adam Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin," a lyrical, romantic, almost conservative exegesis on the Beatles' "Blackbird," to Ken Ueno's "Pharmakon," with three very brief "pre-movements" leading up to a longer main event.

On Friday the boundaries of those pieces... were deliberately ignored. The result was a kind of performance piece, an engaging experience that ended up reaffirming the traditional definitions it seemed to be trying to challenge.

        Anne Midgette, The New York Times, (February 3, 2003)

"The program began with a sneak preview of four works from an intended full-evening suite of pieces now being written for Eighth Blackbird by a posse of young composers called the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The most surprising work was Adam Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin," gurgling washes of sweet tonality, slightly out of kilter, slightly tongue in cheek."
        Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times (March 11, 2002)

"The Amelia [Piano Trio's] program also included the world-premiere of a work composed for the group by the young American, Adam B. Silverman. This was a three-movement piano trio named Sturm... Silverman's program notes, an engaging farrago about Viennese wine, hangovers, "Sturm und Drang" and free tickets, along with some touching wishes and apprehensions,... provided no useful counsel as to how to listen to the music. Maybe none was needed. What I heard was thoroughly accessible, on both a sensual and structural level, and the Amelia's impassioned playing helped to make the work an exceptioanlly pleasurable one, with discernable (and sometimes ravishing) melodic motifs, a rich harmonic vocabulary, and an inebriating (there's that Viennese wine) rhythmic pulse. The music's stylistic ancestors seemed to be Fauré and Chausson on the one hand (for the textures, the harmonies, and the superbly idiomatic instrumental writing), and John Adams on the other (for the relentless drive and dynamic insistence) — an odd marriage, but a successful one... Its three movements were [each] a perpetuum mobile, with ceaseless rapid triplets in the first and last movements, and ceaseless groups of four, at a slower pace, in the middle one, through which an occasional soaring lyrical phrase made its way, like a vast-winged bird over a pullulating tropical rain forest... Silverman is surely a composer to be watched."
        Jonathan Saville, San Diego Reader (February 8, 2002)

"Saturday's concert, which included the Chicago premieres of works by Randolph Coleman, Frederic Rzewski and [The Minimum Security Composers Collective] reflected eighth blackbird's deep involvement in today's barrier-leaping new music, where elements borrowed from rock, jazz and world music combine with classical forms in a multistylistic stew. All of the pieces were either commissioned by or for the ensemble and showed the high degree of collaborative interchange that exists between eighth blackbird and its chosen composers. Indeed, with such a piece as Minimum Security Trailer (2000) it was hard to tell precisely where the creative impulse left off and the re-creative impulse began. A sampling of a larger work by the Minimum Security Composers Collective (Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno), the three pieces ranged from funky post-minimalist twitches, to a kind of easy-listening deconstruction of the Beatles' "Blackbird," to angry flurries of 16th-notes. The ensemble, as is its wont, played them from memory and made one eager to hear the entire 16-movement piece when it's ready next season."
        John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune (January 21, 2002)

"Smelting Solid Gold, by Adam B. Silverman, shreds a bucketful of James Brown tunes and reassembles them John Zorn fashion into an irreverent, humorous, enjoyable pastiche. It's a hoot, more fun than a bathtub full of otters."
        David Cleary, Twenty-First Century Music (February 2001)

"...Adam Silverman, whose beautifully restful Durham for strings was played energetically yet perfectly in tune by the Flux Quartet... opted for harmonic variety...which required mercurially shifting intonations as the chords changed."
        Kyle Gann, The Village Voice (May 2000)

"...The Flux Quartet returned for Adam Silverman's Durham, another world premiere, and a piece in several movements which was quite impressive… Most of it… was moderate- to slow-paced, with only one moderately quick movement. I thought it was a very good piece, and an excellent performance… It sounded to me like it was in a Just Intonation tuning, and is quite a substantial work."
        Joe Monzo, Juxtaposition E-zine (May 2000)

updated June 6, 2004