Kent Nagano and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal’s splendid new disc of John Adams presents three contrasting pieces in their order of composition: Common Tones in Simple Time, Adams’s first orchestral work, from 1979; the 1985 Harmonielehre; and Short Ride in a Fast Machine from 1986. Though Short Ride is Adams’s most-recorded work, I count 10 available recordings of the mighty Harmonielehre, a remarkable number for a piece of this vintage and complexity, calling for so large an orchestra. Nagano’s longstanding personal and professional relationship with Adams, including conducting the 1991 premiere of The Death of Klinghoffer at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, heightens this album’s interest and authority.

Suffice it to say that this burnished, energetic, exhilarating Short Ride compares with the best of them, with the stunning Montreal brass providing a critical edge. Common Tones, with its scrupulously restricted musical means, may well be Adams’s most classically ‘minimalist’ work. Yet already at this stage in his career, his acute sensitivity for orchestral colour and sonority is everywhere in evidence. Nagano and the Montreal players meticulously observe the calibrated nuances on which this work depends. From the first unison sounds, a living musical entity of wondrous beauty emerges with the utmost delicacy over the course of nearly 21 minutes.

Any description of this Harmonielehre must begin with the Decca technical team, whose fully dimensional sound reproduction is a model of clarity and spaciousness. Space is the key here: I don’t know another piece of music that fills a hall quite as completely or rapturously as Harmonielehre, and this recording is a satisfying facsimile of the experience. If those pounding chords that frame Part 1 sound less aggressive than some other readings, this nevertheless proves to be an extraordinarily robust performance, filled with subtle details and nuance, moving with inexorable power towards its cathartic conclusion. The second movement, ‘The Anfortas Wound’, is almost a full minute longer than Adams’s performance (Berliner Philharmoniker, 1/18), with dark-hued harmonic ambiguities unfolding in savourable leisure. The gently sparkling stars evoked by the tender lullaby that initiates ‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’ gather rhythmically precise momentum, textures undulating with the inevitability of planetary orbits, before exploding in an apotheosis of blazing splendour.

This is heartfelt music-making by a fine orchestra, led by one of the composer’s preferred interpreters, resulting in a recording whose sensual sonorities and unabashed spiritual element is likely to disarm even the most hardened sceptics.