Every great orchestra has its own distinctive sound, and there is something about the brightly lit, forthrightly projected way the London Symphony approaches everything it plays that suits John Adams's glittering musical world.
On Wednesday, Adams was the orchestra's guest conductor in a programme of his own works. The titles of the pieces he had chosen - Lollapalooza, Century Rolls and Harmonielehre - did not give much away, but in performance it became a programme cast in the traditional mould of overture, concerto and symphony, although in each case Adams's take on the conventional form was as quirky and original as ever.
The pieces also offered a series of snapshots on specific moments in the musical history of the first third of the 20th century, viewed through Adams's personal post-minimalist lens. In Lollapalooza, it is US music of the 1930s, of Copland and his contemporaries, that seems to be lurking behind the rhythms of this rather one-paced opener; while in the piano concerto Century Rolls, the source is French. That's obvious in the slow movement, a gymnopédie in the Satie mould, but more oblique in the outer movements.
The meshing of textures and the relationship between soloist and orchestra in the first evokes Ravel unmistakably, and the jazzy riffs of the finale do occasionally recall the brittle world of Les Six, although the outrageous polyrhythms that are set up between the soloist (Joanna McGregor here, totally in her element) and the orchestra are very definitely part of Adams's own armoury. If Century Rolls always seems fractionally too long for its material, it remains an attractive and listener-friendly piece.
There is not a note too many in Harmonielehre, though, which remains one of Adams's greatest achievements. It is his homage to music in the first decade of the 20th century, with references to the leading composers of that time - luscious, glittering textures straight out of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, a slow movement that begins with a memory of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony and climbs towards the screaming dissonance from the opening movement of Mahler's 10th. These are fused into a monumental structure propelled by the mechanics of minimalism. Adams and the LSO never let the tension slacken, driving it remorselessly forward; in the Barbican's acoustics the climaxes were shattering.
· The London Symphony Orchestra and Joanna MacGregor perform the music of John Adams conducted by the composer at the Warwick Arts Centre, tonight (November 22, 2002)
