As part of his final year as Music Director and following a two-season celebration of the Orchestra’s 125th anniversary, Peter Oundjian and the RSNO here present their second recording of music by John Adams, with the exceptional participation of the Doric String Quartet. Written for a large orchestra including six percussionists, keyboard sampler, and amplified steel-string guitar, Naive and Sentimental Music is a sweepingly symphonic masterpiece, full of contrasts and clashes. It reflects the dichotomy between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poetry as analysed by Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, as well as the ‘bipolar’ musical life of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dedicatee of this piece, who conducted the first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999. Absolute Jest is a large-scale scherzo for amplified string quartet and orchestra, heavily inspired by the music of Beethoven, which Adams has always deeply admired. The quartet of soloists, a late addition to the score, emphasises the echoes of Beethoven’s music (mainly his string quartets) and facilitates a ‘hyperspace rate’ of virtuosity, which the Doric String Quartet here perfectly demonstrates.

Violinist Augustin Hadelich embarks on an American Road Trip, travelling the musical highways and byways of his adoptive homeland in the company of pianist Orion Weiss. The duo perform works by a melting pot of American composers, writing in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and drawing on a diversity of idioms, influences and inspirations … from European Romanticism to revivalist hymns; from blues and jazz to bluegrass; from the banjo and ukelele to Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, and from a little Mexican star to exquisite Japanese carvings. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives and John Adams take their place beside Amy Beach, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Eddie South, Howdy Forrester, Manuel M. Ponce and – flying the flag for today’s composers along with Adams – Daniel Bernard Roumain and Stephen Hartke.

The longing to overcome human boundaries led the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to begin an experiment that formed a threat to the whole of humanity, and whose scientific results still do today. The question of the moral implications of the atomic bomb is raised in John Adams’ opera, just as much as that of the influence on the private lives of the main characters. Doctor Atomic is the fifth work to result from almost twenty years of collaboration between the American composer and his fellow American director and Erasmus Prize-winner Peter Sellars.

Their Warner Classics debut makes clear that Christina & Michelle Naughton show great imagination in their programming: Messiaen's mystical and epic Visions de l'Amen, composed during World War II, appears alongside John Adams' boisterous and percussive Hallelujah Junction, inspired by a truck stop on the border of Nevada and California. The CD is completed with J.S. Bach's serenely moving Gotttes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106, in an arrangement by the contemporary Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag.

In BIS' Chinoiserie, pianist Jenny Lin brings one of the most compelling and relevant themed recitals to be heard on disc in years, a collection of pieces by Western composers that attempts to explore the subject of China in some regard, not only musically but culturally.

John Adams’ music has long since captured the admiration of listeners for its inimitable American qualities. City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with Adams calling it ‘an imaginary film score’ in its evocation of a terse, melodramatic and menace-drenched sound world. Fearful Symmetries exemplifies Adams’ steamroller motor rhythms, endlessly inventive in their shifts of timbre, texture and color. The album ends with a work dedicated to Marin Alsop, a capricious “Spider Dance” of memorable rhythmic drive.

Star pianist Daniil Trifonov releases his new album My American Story – North, embarking on a very personal musical journey across the Americas. The first of a total of two albums, My American Story – North, begins in the USA, where Trifonov has spent almost half of his life. It features a collection of pieces reflecting the variety of his experiences. The album’s diverse repertoire “has given me access to many perspectives, styles, cultures, places, people, stories and forms of expression that have shaped and molded my experience of America,” says Trifonov.

Nonesuch releases the first recording of John Adams’ 2017 opera, Girls of the Golden West, on April 26, 2024. Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars created the opera’s libretto, drawing from original sources, and also directs this performance. The composer leads the LA Phil in this live recording from Disney Hall. Girls of the Golden West also features the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon, and a cast led by Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny.

John Adams’ 2005 opera explores the personal and moral issues surrounding the invention of the atomic bomb. Captured live in concert, it has colossal power and conviction. At its center is Gerald Finley’s commanding performance as Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist wracked by doubts. Having sung it at the premiere and many times since, he produces a magnificently characterized creation. Julia Bullock, Brindley Sherratt, Samuel Sakker, and Andrew Staples are all superb in supporting roles and Adams himself draws virtuoso playing from a truly galvanized BBC Symphony Orchestra. A major recording of a modern operatic classic.

Bruce Brubaker artistic skill and understanding of this music is beyond reproach and will thrill any fan of the collected composers work on this CD. The sound quality is outstanding as well. Bruce Brubaker has recorded two CDs on the Arabesque label in a continuing series exploring modern American piano music. The most recent, Inner Cities, was released in September 2003, and includes Brubaker's transcription of Pat Nixon's aria from Adams's opera, Nixon in China. The previous CD, Glass Cage , with pieces by Glass and Cage, was named one of the ten best releases of 2000 by The New Yorker magazine.

A superlative program of piano music by American composers is offered by pianist Heidi Williams. The oldest work on the program dates from 1988 (William Bolcom) and the most recent was written in 2009 (Daniel Crozier), giving us a snapshot of what American composers have been writing for piano in the past 25 years. Praised by New York critic Harris Goldsmith for her ¨dazzling performances¨ and ¨impeccable solistic authority,¨ American pianist Heidi Louise Williams has appeared in performances across the United States and internationally. Her concert schedule has included solo and chamber music recitals at the Kennedy Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Brevard Summer Music Festival, the Peabody Conservatory of Music and a debut recital in St. Louis as winner of its 2000 Artist Presentation Society Auditions, as well as concerto appearances with the Chicago Chamber Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony, and others. Williams is on the piano faculty at the Florida State University College of Music. She completed her BM, MM, and DMA degrees at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland.

Conceived and realized in partnership with Q2 Music’s Peabody award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, Splitting Adams is Alarm Will Sound’s tribute to American composer John Adams, and in particular to his works Chamber Symphony (1992) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Presented with commentary tracks from MTC’s host Nadia Sirota, Alarm Will Sound’s artistic director Alan Pierson, and the composer himself, the podcast-plus-performance conveys a rare sense of interaction for the listener; not only does the music, rendered in all its lush detail by the 17 musicians in AWS, capture and connect the long trajectory between the two works, but the commentary also shines a revealing light on the story behind the music.

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.

On October 19, 1999, Nonesuch Records released The John Adams Earbox, a 10-CD box set retrospective, representing nearly all of John Adams’s recorded output for the label. The set includes all of the composer’s major works with which Adams has redefined contemporary classical music over the previous two decades. All recordings on The John Adams Earbox were supervised by the composer, and many were conducted or performed by Adams as well. All but four works on the Earbox were originally released on Nonesuch as first recordings. The John Adams Earbox includes examples from every phase of Adams’s career, from his earliest orchestral pieces such as Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985), and Harmonium (1980), to the widely hailed operas Nixon in China (1985-86) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1990-91), to works of this decade including Chamber Symphony (1992), Violin Concerto (1993), John’s Book of Alleged Dances (written for Kronos Quartet in 1994), Gnarly Buttons (1995) and the 1995 stagework I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky.

This unique recording couples the music of two major 20th-century composers, and includes the world premiere on disc of Riley's "The Heaven Ladder, Book 7," commissioned by Cheng-Cochran and written in 1994. California-based pianist Gloria Cheng has become a favoured collaborator with some of the most demanding of today's composer/conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Essa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen, for her renditions of thorny 20th century scores. "The multifarious pulsings of Adams's Phrygian Gates (all 26 minutes of it) are more palatable here than on some rival versions, and the relatively brief China Gates (just five minutes) are well worth visiting. Terry Riley's pieces are more varied in colour and rhythm, less obviously 'minimalist', than you might have expected, with the worlds of jazz remaining well within earshot. Gloria Cheng-Cochran seems fully absorbed in the tasks to hand, and the sound is superb." (Gramophone Magazine).