A Flowering Tree was commissioned for the 2006 Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Adams became involved at the behest of the director - and longtime friend/collaborator - Peter Sellars, who organized this visionary event and extended invitations to musicians and artists of various disciplines from around the world.

Given the festival's global sensibility, Adams took the framework of Mozart's The Magic Flute, a tale of physical and spiritual transformation, and created a new work with a parallel scenario by adapting ancient Indian folk tales and poetry. The libretto, co-written with Sellars, is sung in English, except for chorale passages written in Spanish especially for the Scola Cantorum de Caracas - "an extraordinary amateur chorus," as The New York Times has called them, based in Venezuela - who were brought over to perform at the premiere. Adams was making a deeper point with his bilingual text: "Using two languages is also a reaffirmation of my feeling that we are living in a time of global cultural awareness, with all its pain and wonder." 

 

This recording was made at the Barbican Center, London, in August 2007, with the London Symphony Orchestra.

American composer, Stephen Paulus recognised particularly for his empathetic vocal writing. In Splendid Jewel, based on a fourteenth-century lauda, Paulus imparts a mediaeval flavour to the setting of this ancient text, which he then warms with his own harmonic language. 

Cameron Carpenter - lauded as "the Maverick organist" (The New York Times), "madly original" (Alex Ross / TheRestIsNoise.com), and "a superstar of the 21st-century organ" (Departures magazine) - has already been compared to Fred Astaire and the Kronos Quartet, and for good reason. "I'm madly in love with performing, but not with the organ, or even most organ music," he admits. "I was never interested in Virgil Fox or E. Power Biggs. But Nureyev, Liberace, David Bowie, Karl Lagerfeld, those guys are my heroes. The uninhibited, the unabashed, the creators, the personalities.. the people who are their message, not their medium." That describes Carpenter perfectly, though he's no mere showman. Among organists it is generally accepted that he's unmatched technically, and Revolutionary's enclosed DVD shows what many audiences have already noticed: that his feet are as accurate, fast and musical on the organ's foot pedals (as in Chopin's Revolutionary Etude, wherein the left-hand part is played solely by the feet) as his hands are on the keys.

 

In short, Revolutionary not only showcases an artist who is breaking ground, but runs a musical gamut that any musician would be hard pressed to match. Classically speaking, there are only four organ works included. Three are major pinnacles of the organ repertoire: the blistering, nearly unplayable Etude in Octaves by the French modernist Jeanne Demessieux, Prelude and Fugue in B major by Marcel Dupré, and Bach's deeply moving chorale-prelude Now Come, Savior of the Gentiles. The fourth is the world premiere recording of Cameron's suggestive Love Song No. 1.

The album's major departures, though, are found in Duke Ellington's Solitude (wittily combined with Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze); Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, and Vladimir Horowitz' Carmen Variations. Two of Chopin's Études are presented so convincingly that they might have been organ music. Finally, Carpenter's Evolutionary Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is an outrageous survey of the various instrumental arrangements that made Bach's piece famous.

All this is recorded not on a pipe organ, but on the equally revolutionary Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Pipe Organ at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City - an organ that, rising out of the destruction of Trinity's traditional pipe organ on September 11, 2001, continues to challenge the status quo of the pipe organ and the artistic possibilities of organ playing in general.