While the first of John Adams' two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra made a feature of two of his most recent major scores, the second looked back to the 1990s. Both the Violin Concerto from 1993 and Naive and Sentimental Music, finished five years later, make full use of the wider harmonic vocabulary Adams developed while composing his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, and allowed him to give freer rein to his melodic invention.
In the concerto, that greater range allows Adams to float seamless solo lines over the churning textures of the first movement, and then shift the rotating chaconne theme of the second through a kaleidoscope of harmonic colours, before the motoric tour de force of the final perpetuum mobile. In the Schiller-inspired Naive and Sentimental Music, the bold contrast between the disarmingly diatonic theme that starts off the first movement, and the darker, more complex world that eventually overwhelms it, creates a song of innocence and experience that the younger Adams, whose music had so emphasised rhythmic drive and harmonic certainty, would never have contemplated.
The two scores remain among Adams' finest achievements, and in these performances, introduced by a romp through the irrepressible and almost Coplandesque Short Ride in a Fast Machine, they seemed as powerfully wrought as ever.
Midori was the soloist in the concerto, spinning a silvery thread of tone above the LSO's remorseless figurations and going right to the heart of the slow movement's bittersweet nostalgia.
Every soloist who takes up this work seems to find something new in it, just as there is much more to discover in the great spans of Naive and Sentimental Music; already, though, it seems as satisfyingly symphonic as anything Adams has composed.