Harmonielehre
-
79115
Track Listing
-
117:03
-
212:16
-
310:31
News & Reviews
-
"It would be difficult to make an account of all the ways John Adams’s music has influenced me and my work," Nico Muhly writes in his note in the upcoming 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, "but in the spirit of writing something personal, I’d like to offer a few perhaps impersonal observations about his work in a more circular, even crabwise, fashion. There are specific places in John’s music where there is a rhyme hidden across decades, relating to an elusive sense of 'meaning' in his music which radiates across his body of work." You can read his complete note from the box set here.
Nonesuch Records releases the forty-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, on July 1, 2022. It includes two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. Nonesuch made its first record with John Adams in 1985; he was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. “John Adams coming to the label was one of the central events in our company’s history,” says Robert Hurwitz, Nonesuch’s longtime President and current Chairman Emeritus. “The recordings were done in real time, mostly within a few months of a piece’s first performance. Every recording was either conducted by John, or made under close supervision of the composer, who was in the control booth for every album—when he wasn’t on the podium.” Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels.
-
About This Album
Adams’s Nonesuch debut takes its title from Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmony Teachings. The New York Times has called Harmonielehre “a dazzling, whirling crystal ball of a piece in which Mr. Adams at once celebrates and parodies lush Romantic harmony.“
Credits
MUSICIANS
San Francisco Symphony
Edo de Waart, conductorPRODUCTION CREDITS
Recorded March 23, 1985, at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco
Engineer: John Newton
Art Direction and Design by Carin Goldberg
Cover photography by William Clift
Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz
More From
Adams’s Nonesuch debut takes its title from Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmony Teachings. The New York Times has called Harmonielehre “a dazzling, whirling crystal ball of a piece in which Mr. Adams at once celebrates and parodies lush Romantic harmony.“
Adams’s Nonesuch debut takes its title from Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmony Teachings. The New York Times has called Harmonielehre “a dazzling, whirling crystal ball of a piece in which Mr. Adams at once celebrates and parodies lush Romantic harmony.“
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Recorded March 23, 1985, at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco
Engineer: John Newton
Art Direction and Design by Carin Goldberg
Cover photography by William Clift
Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz

79115
MUSICIANS
San Francisco Symphony
Edo de Waart, conductor