American conductor David Robertson, who served as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2018, is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of the music of John Adams.
He describes Adams’ music in cinematic terms:
The main thing that you find in every single one of his pieces is that it is a journey through a landscape. And as you proceed, you see similar types of trees and hills and mountains. And the further you go on this journey, the more you start to slowly notice that the landscape has changed. This is the evolution in all his pieces.
In a previous post, we explored Adams’ Harmonielehre, an epic three-movement orchestral work composed in 1985. The title, which translates from German as “study of harmony,” refers to a treatise written by Arnold Schoenberg in 1911. “The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece,” Adams writes. The work’s titanic opening, involving 39 E minor hammer blows, was inspired by a dream image involving an oil tanker taking off like a rocket from San Francisco Bay.
Harmonielehre comes alive in new, exciting ways in this performance, recorded on December 12, 2025, featuring Robertson and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony:
Recordings
- Adams: Harmonielehre, David Robertson, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Amazon
–Featured Image: photograph by Vern Evans