Naive Or Knowing ?

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in music by John Adams. The headline piece on the disk is Naive and Sentimental Music and also featured are works titled Mother of the Man and Chain to the Rhythm. I think this is the first disk of John Adams that has found its' way off the shelf, I do have a few in my collection. These are recent works and are long past the minimalist phase that he still tends to get grouped with. There is a sparsness to some of the scoring, particularly in Mother of the Man, which could be called minimal but not minimalist in the sense of Reich, Riley and Glass. Mother of the Man incidentally features a guitar part played by David Tanenbaum. The packaging has the feel of a rock or pop music release ( even down to the length of the disk, barely 45 minutes of music ) Going back to the booklet notes, which I don't like to just repeat verbatim, I'm reminded that in fact, the entire disk is "Naive and Sentimental Music" and the "Mother" and "Chain" pieces are in effect second and third movements to what might be a symphony in all but name. The disk certainly hangs together as a unified whole that could be looked upon as a celebration of nature and nostalgia but with undercurrents of the threat posed by modern life.