You wouldn’t want to be going out at night in Los Angeles after listening to Adams’s City noir. Dark, menacing and brooding during the first movement, punctuated by eerie silences in the second and threatening to spiral out of control by the end of the third, City noir is hardly an idyllic representation of Americana.

To be sure, lyrical moments do occasionally cut through Adams’s dystopian homage to city life. Soaring, sweeping string lines rise from the first movement’s thick fog, while the supine second movement is languid and bittersweet. City noir’s murky ambience is also offset by energetic, episodic jazz-like cameos that shine a light, big band-style, on various solo instruments within the orchestra: alto saxophone, double bass and drum kit in the opening movement, more saxophone and trombone in the second, and vibraphone and trumpet in the third.

Marin Alsop treats these concertante-like interjections in a different way to the sweeping build-ups and sudden breakdowns one often experiences in Adams’s orchestral music. Instead, we are presented with a more layered, terraced approach. Both are exploited to great effect during the work’s powerful finale, where Alsop pushes the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra to the very edge of chaos in a cliffhanger-like ending. Alsop imparts more drive and intensity in the first movement, too, although there’s very little to separate this excellent recording from the equally impressive St Louis Symphony under David Robertson.

After the high drama of City noir, there appears to be very little to fear in Adams’s Fearful Symmetries. Composed in 1988, this whimsical, pulse-heavy work continues where The Chairman Dances left off, while the quirky, overture-style Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance provides a colourful musical re-enactment of a description taken from the San Francisco Whig newspaper in 1853 of Lola’s dance. Dedicated to Alsop, who seems to grasp the full measure of Adams’s music with every performance, the composer was so taken by his spider dance that he subsequently incorporated it into his opera Girls of the Golden West (see page 88).