Adams - My Father Knew Charles Ives; Harmonielehre review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Nashville Symphony/Guerrero
(Naxos)
John Adams’s work, imagining a musical meeting of minds, sounds refined, though Harmonielehre is missing some majesty

Though the San Francisco Symphony brought it to London just a week after the premiere in 2003, My Father Knew Charles Ives has had few British performances since, and remains one of John Adams’s less well-known orchestral scores. It’s a substantial work – three movements lasting nearly half an hour – designed both as a homage to the two men mentioned in the title, and as an evocation of the New England in which they both lived and Adams himself grew up.