Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I really like 'On the transmigration of souls'. It's hard to say quite why but I find it rather powerful (I think some of that probably comes down to certain similarities it has to a pop song I'm rather fond of called 'one of our submaries'). As to how it compares to his other works, the only other one I really know is Klinghoffer (which I think is very fine indeed), but it's difficult to make a fair comparison since I've seen that done so well live.

I am in agreement with those who found 'Souls' weak Adams. I think the problem may lie in the facts that he had a given theme or story to tell and he had to get it done by a certain time. However I know people who think it is one of his best.

My favorite Adams list is 'Century Rolls,' 'Gnarly Buttons,' 'John's Book of Alleged Dances' - this I saw used as the music for a dance work with great transitions - 'The Dharma at Big Sur' - which I am glad to see is available on CD - 'Harmonielehre,' 'The Wound Dresser,' 'My Father Knew Charles Ives,' and 'Naïve and Sentimental Music.'

I am not a fan of his Violin Concerto - I think he was still working out how to use a large orchestra. Which I feel he does in 'Naive' and 'Centruy Rolls.'

My biggest disappointment was going to see the premiere of 'Doctor Atomic.' I am not sure if it was the music, the terrible staging or both that made it one of the longest nights of music I have ever sat through. There is one powerful section when Oppenheimer has a choice between the bomb and a life - I am just sorry that it did not end right there. The last 20 years - I mean minutes - of the opera could be cut without the loss of history or music. It was like one of those B western death scenes where you think that villain will never die.

I am glad you like the violin concerto. I have a very good friend who thinks it is one of his best works. The great thing about music is that everyone's taste is different - if not all music would sound the same. The problems come when people think that their way is the only way and those who disagree are musically challenged.

Which recording of the VC do you have - I prefer the one with Kremer on Nonesuch.

BTW there was a selection from 'Doctor Atomic' - I can not remember the name by probably Bryn will tell us - that premiered on R3 before the opera was produced that made me think that the opera was going to be great. Unfortunately like most movies, the opera did not live up to it's preview.

It was one aria from Doctor Atomic, to be precise.

I take to most of Adams's music immediately, though there are works which haven't worked their magic on me until I've heard them live, Harmonielehre being the major case in point - perhaps the recording I'd previously heard wasn't too hot, but the sense of impetus and momentum to be found in that and many other works of his, Dharma and Harmonium for example, needs physical heft behind it to make its full effect.

 Mary Chambers's comments on another thread about Walton's Belshazzar's Feast being ' thumpy loud music' which obviously didn't appeal to her made much more sense when I saw her comments on the 'Guilty Musical Pleasures' thread too; it's obvious that much of the music that many of the rest of us love but which lies outside the classical tradition doesn't work for her at all. I'd venture to suggest that exactly the same applies to Adams's music: it's informed by aspects of popular culture in a way that isn't crossover, but rather a borrowing of concepts and sounds from one genre to use in another, for cross-fertilisation rather than as a straight transplantation. One contributor to the other board dismissed the opening movement of Dharma, played by itself on CoTW as mere 'noodling', but if you hear it as referring to the world of Jean-Luc Ponty it makes absolute sense; in any case the work has an organic curve of development towards its climax, and to wrench a single movement - especially the wrong movement - from the piece was surely a mistake.

p.s. Has anybody else noticed that the 'other' Violin Concerto seems to grow out of the same ground as one of Moeran's short works? Lonely Waters IIRC.

I was at the North American Premiere of El Nino in San Francisco. I wrote this after the concert as a comment on attending concerts
and a reaction to an overwhelming silence at the centre of a certain strain of North American thought, at the time, and which Adams in his very 'knowing' musical style still, somehow, avoids addressing. That night I was accompanied by a fully paid up member of a 'minority' (her words not mine - she is also very 'knowing' ) and I would be unable to print her reaction.

http://alcor.concordia.ca/~kaustin/cecdiscuss/2001/0170.html

Unfortunately, like many U.S. people, we were prevented  from seeing 'The Death of Klinghoffer' at the time. It was performed in London.
I heard it was more satisfying. (see Laurie Anderson, The Wire, August, 2007)

John Adams was interviewed by Andrew McGregor on CD review today. They played music from the recording of A Flowering Tree, which AM compared to El Nino. Compared ? El Nino is one of the Adams pieces that I know best and the extracts from A Flowering Tree sounded like a direct lift ( admittedly brief extracts on a first hearing ).

Perhaps that opens a wider question, in that composers will have styles and licks that identify them and enable us to immediately say "that's Handel" or Bach ( or Glass ! ) But at what stage does that become unacceptable and indicate a running out of ideas ?

It's worth a whole thread on its own, that one, BZ, but an important point to make is that some composers have identifying fingerprints which are easy to spot even when their style changes (an obvious and much cited example being Stravinsky, immediately recognisable throughout his whole output, even when the works in themselves are hugely varied. Not all of Adams's music is exactly the same: the two violin concertos - one for a standard fiddle, the other for an electric one - have very little in common, for example, but I can think of other composers who seem to be quarrying from the same source for every work they produce: of contemporary Britons, Adès and Turnage are two who immediately strike me as being stuck in this sort of rut.

I realise that it could seem a little unfair, GG, but IMHO those two (and they're not alone) return over and over again to the same figures, textures and sounds, so that they seem to be trapped in existing territory rather than exploring pastures new, and having been enticed into each of their soundworlds by a particular work, I now find that (to me) they're Alice in Wonderland soundworlds, in which whatever path you take brings you back to the same place rather than opening up a new prospect.