The opera repertoire would be considerably diminished if composers had abandoned their ‘problem children’ at the first sign of trouble. John Adams confronted one of the biggest disappointments of his career when Girls of the Golden West was panned by a chorus of critics at its premiere in 2017. Much of their ire was aimed at the libretto that the composer’s longtime collaborator Peter Sellars constructed from primary sources to uncover the stories hidden beneath the foundational American myth of the mid-19th-century California Gold Rush. Sellars was accused of saddling Adams with a directionless, tediously talky and tendentiously ‘woke’ libretto. But aspects of Adams’s score also provoked censure.

Even critics who recognised buried treasure in the work advised that GGW needed significant tightening. That process has unfolded in two stages, beginning with a trimmer version produced at Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam in 2019. This recording represents GGW’s third incarnation and was made from two live concert performances given at Walt Disney Concert Hall in January 2023. It consolidates changes made for the 2019 staging with even deeper cuts to the original score. The result is an opera that is radically different from what audiences encountered at the premiere in 2017.

It’s a matter not merely of being much more streamlined – the new version is about one-third shorter than the original, clocking in at a little more than two hours – but of heightened theatricality and urgency as well. For example, Adams added new material by completely rewriting the final scene of the first of GGW’s two acts; the original version had struck many observers as diffuse and meandering. The rewritten scene culminates in the horrifying transformation of a chorus of miners into an angry lynch mob and anticipates the opera’s violent ending.

Unencumbered by the complications of a full stage production, the concert performances that served as the basis for this premiere recording of GGW were able to keep musical values front and centre. The splendid original cast who created the roles (with one exception) again took part, with Adams offering his own invaluable perspective on the score as conductor.

GGW foregrounds the diversity of those who participated in the Gold Rush. Adams gives each a distinctive vocal characterisation. Julia Bullock brings wry understanding and lyrical warmth to Dame Shirley, the vivid observer from the East who frames the opera, while Davóne Tines radiates defiant charisma as Ned Peters, a formerly enslaved cowboy to whom she is drawn. The Chinese prostitute Ah Sing (Hye Jung Lee) and Mexican bar worker Josefa Segovia (Daniela Mack, the new addition to the cast) are the other ‘girls’. They become entangled in the desperate desire of the young Anglo Joe Cannon (Paul Appleby), who, along with fellow miner Clarence (Ryan McKinny), personifies the smouldering, drunken anger that kindles the opera’s fatal culmination. The card dealer and bartender Ramón (Elliot Madore), Josefa’s partner, rounds out the inspired cast.

The hard-hammered syncopations underpinning the opera’s opening monologue – the orchestra mimics a giant pickaxe – establish the often harsh, rhythmically agitated, driven sound world that predominates in Adams’s score. His notably pared-down vocabulary makes space for sardonic echoes of Brecht-Weill – Adams has written his own music to authentic miner song lyrics. But there are passages as well of soaring ‘fathomless splendour’ (as Dame Shirley phrases it).

The Los Angeles Philharmonic show their deep familiarity with the composer’s language, as do the Los Angeles Master Chorale, expertly marshalled by Grant Gershon to impersonate the chorus of miners carousing one moment and on a bloodthirsty rampage the next.

The resentment triggered by the ruthless stakes of the mining life, threaded throughout GGW, seethes and surges at various points in the first act and comes into focus in the second, a dark night of passage that hurtles towards the tragic conclusion. Adams aficionados will notice echoes of a similar pattern in Doctor Atomic and the Passion as depicted in The Gospel According to the Other Mary.

GGW is hardly the first work of John Adams to have provoked intense scepticism. On the evidence of this recording, the history that seems to be repeating itself is likely to include eventual vindication and embrace of a vital addition to the art form.