The Best $7 You'll Spend All Week

I don't usually recommend music here, but since the new John Adams CD on Naxos contains his setting of Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser," I figure I can get away with it this once, even if the real reasons I bought the album were "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" and "Shaker Loops." But I was struck by this slightly wrongheaded comment in one of the reviews listed on the Naxos site, concerning Adams's arrangement of Whitman's description of his experiences as a war nurse:

"Does this kind of text really bear setting to music? I am not convinced, though I would not for one moment doubt Adams’ deep sincerity or seriousness, and there is indeed a terrible beauty about this music, full of compassion as it is. A moving yet very uncomfortable experience--which may well be precisely what the composer intended."

Yeah, I'm going to guess that when he chose to set a poem with lines such as "From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand / I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood," Adams wasn't aiming to make his listeners comfortable about the ravages of war. "Does this kind of text really bear setting to music?" Sheesh. Tell you what, though: I'll buy Leonard Slatkin dinner if he programs "The Wound Dresser" at the Kennedy Center by Veterans Day. Dinner and drinks if he conducts it on Veterans or Memorial Day.