PROGRAM NOTES
by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
John Adams (born in 1947)

Composed in 1985.
Premiered on January 31, 1986 in Milwaukee, conducted by Lukas Foss.

The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra) is a by-product of Adams’ opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in October 1987. The opera, explained Michael Steinberg in his liner notes for the recording of The Chairman Dances on Nonesuch Records, is “neither comic nor strictly historical though it contains elements of both. It is set in three days of President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972, one act for each day. The single scene of the third act takes place in the Great Hall of the People, where there is yet another exhausting banquet, this one hosted by the Americans.

The preface to the score gives the following description of The Chairman Dances: “Madame Mao, alias Jiang Ching, has gatecrashed the Presidential banquet. She is seen standing first where she is most in the way of the waiters. After a few minutes, she brings out a box of paper lanterns and hangs them around the hall, then strips down to a cheongsam, skin-tight from neck to ankle, and slit up to the hip. She signals the orchestra to play and begins to dance herself. Mao is becoming excited. He steps down from his portrait on the wall and they begin to foxtrot together. They are back in Yenan, the night is warm, they are dancing to the gramophone ...

“Act Three, in which both reminiscing couples, the Nixons and the Maos, find themselves contrasting the vitality and optimism of youth with their present condition of age and power, is full of shadows; Jiang Ching’s and Mao’s foxtrot in the opera is therefore more melancholy than The Chairman Dances. This is, uninhibitedly, a cabaret number, an entertainment, and a funny piece; as the Chairman and the former actress turned Deputy Head of the Cultural Revolution make their long trip back through time they turn into Fred and Ginger. The chugging music we first hear is associated with Mao; the seductive swaying-hips melody — La Valse translated across immense distances — is Jiang Ching’s. You might imagine the piano part at the end being played by Richard Nixon.”

MORE NOTES ON THIS PROGRAM

COPLAND - Billy the Kid Suite
FORTNER - Fantasma (World Premiere)
GERSHWIN - Variations on "I've Got Rhythm"
CRESTON - Symphony No. 2
GERSHWIN - Rhapsody in Blue

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