Adams: Harmonium/Klinghoffer Choruses

What makes this disc sound simple is the composer's tasteful West Coast minimalism--its listener-friendly impatience with unvarying repetition; spare, keyboards-enhanced instrumentation; and generally mellow sound. Harmonium remains Adams's breakthrough work, his first big statement of consonant harmony. He became famous with it. What Adams makes apparently easy is the bringing together--the harmonizing, if you will--of disparate parts: very personal lyric poetry by two very different writers, John Donne and Emily Dickinson, sung by a choral group rather than soloists. And it works. Like the Nonesuch recording of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, the new Harmonium has been lovingly performed, but necessarily lacks something of the brazenness, the unexpected quality of the earlier one, the sense of having to prove itself. The choruses from the "CNN opera" The Death of Klinghoffer (certainly a tough subject) slow down stage action significantly; they're more effective on their own. Highly chromatic, delicate, and melancholy, these two works showcase Adams's thoughtful side, and remain unabashedly beautiful. --Robert Burns Neveldine