Adams: Harmonielehre; Short Ride In A Fast Machine

San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson ThomasSFS Media SFS 0053 ***

This CD brings John Adams’s 40-minute Harmonielehre back to San Francisco, where the San Francisco Symphony gave the first performance and made the first recording in 1985. The piece brings the techniques of minimalism to bear on the legacy of musical romanticism, with the title taken from a treatise by Schoenberg, a composer with whom Adams seems to have a kind of love-hate relationship. Adams indulges in the full, orgiastic sound-world of the late romantic orchestra, gorging on big, film-score-like tunes, making a myriad of references to specific composers and works, while delighting in a late 20th- century patina of pulsation.

It’s a venture in sentimental, idealistic, hyperbolic make- believe, a kind of Steven Spielberg in sound, if you like. Short Ride in a Fast Machine

is what it says it is. Tilson Thomas does both works in style. url.ie/e8oo