Featured Book: Hallelujah Junction, continued

Copy at Case Memorial Library
"By the end of the first season the Bach Society Orchestra had become dangerously high profile among campus activities, and the inevitable journalistic comeuppance was awaiting me. This came in the form of a review in The Harvard Crimson that marched me to the scaffold for my overreaching programming: '… The program Adams chose for the group demanded a far higher level of musical competence than one can reasonably expect of any undergraduate organization. …' The Crimson critic's complaints were doubtless accurate, but they missed the palpable enthusiasm and unbuttoned pleasure that both the orchestra members and their conductor and possibly even the audience were experiencing. The Beethoven symphony [No. 2]'s exuberant aggressiveness shocked and delighted me. Listening to recordings or even a live performance could never have prepared me for the surge of energy that I felt from the podium. With its blindingly bright D major clanging against the plaster walls of Paine Hall, it introduced me firsthand to the sheer radicalism and manic drive of Beethoven's early music." (pp. 38-40)