Amazon.co.uk Review
John Adams enjoyed a sizeable exposure in the 2001 Proms and was the subject of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's contemporary composer festival in January 2002--all of which no doubt explains the decision of Chandos to reissue this 1995 disc of Adams at his most high-energy and new-world glamorous combined with two less dazzling works by the younger, post-minimally streetwise David Lang.
Are You Experienced? is Lang's best-known work to date, a kind of naughty modernist expressionism that pairs spoken narrative with blowsily effective instrumental writing. Like its companion
Under Orpheus, it's designed as much to propagandise an idea
about music as to deliver the music itself. The Adams pieces are more innocent: an aural sound-bath to sink into and enjoy. The expansive
Grand Pianola Music gives plenty of scope for that, although there's marginally more muscle in the
composer's own recording with the London Sinfonietta for Nonesuch. Be warned, too, that the
Short Ride in a Fast Machine is an arrangement for wind ensemble of what was written as a full orchestral score. You might prefer the original. --
Michael White
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