John Adams: Best of the Best

Generally considered a charter member of the minimalist composers circle, Adams (b. 1947) has long seemed out of place with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. His operas, while based on newsworthy contemporary events rather than age-old fables, are certainly American--and tightly focused--in character, but his chamber and concerto works are big in both design and sound. Here are his essential recordings.

	Adams: The Death of Klinghoffer / Nagano, Sylvan, Maddalena
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Amazon.com essential recording In The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), John Adams turns his cascading minimalism to the tragedy of the Achille Lauro. This spacious recording makes grand what seems so minor in the great scheme of things: a group of terrorists hijack an ocean liner and kill a wheelchair-bound Jewish retiree, Leon Klinghoffer. If the conceit of Adams' earlier opera, Nixon in China, seems a bit incredulous (Richard Nixon as opera subject?), The Death of Klinghoffer is genuine tragedy--Greek chorus and all. Alice...Read more
	Adams: Violin Concerto, etc / Kremer, Nagano, Adams
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Amazon.com essential recording Turned loose on John Adams's surprisingly flexible violin concerto, the team of conductor Kent Nagano and soloist Gidon Kremer do justice to its passionate verve. Nagano leads the London Symphony Orchestra to the point of near-explosion as it approaches Kremer's sluicing take on the work. Kremer hits the right slipping scales and sometimes slashing skids like magic, with the orchestra seeping into the sound and leaping forward for Kremer to chase. The sound is effusively rich and far distant...Read more
	Adams: El Dorado; Liszt, Busoni / John Adams, Kent Nagano
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Amazon.com essential recording John Adams's El Dorado is in some ways program music, with a twist. It's an imaginary accompaniment, he writes in the liner essay, to a diptych with the unmolested nature of the New World in one panel and that same world with man in it in the other panel. Certainly Adams's characterization of the piece's drama is apt, as it indeed bursts with fierceness at exactly the point where man comes to believe in dominating and subjugating nature, where any hint of the romantic tradition crashes headlong...Read more
	Adams: Fearful Symmetries, Wound-Dresser / Adams, Sylvan
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Amazon.com essential recording This 1989 release became an unexpected surprise hit, primarily because of the extraordinary tone poem The Wound Dresser. Written to Walt Whitman's poem of the same name, it deals with Whitman's musings on the Civil War. There is hardly a hint of Adams's traditional (and usually blithe) minimalistic impulses here. This is the "dark" side of the composer that is to surface later in his opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Fearful Symmetries, the companion piece here, is more typical of Adams; it's a...Read more