Composed in 1980 at the urging of Edo de Waart, then the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Harmonium represents the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between the Bay Area composer John Adams and the San Francisco Symphony. The work, dedicated to de Waart, received its premiere performance in April 1981 by the San Francisco Symphony, during their first season in Davies Symphony Hall, and was subsequently recorded in 1984 for ECM. It was re-recorded in 1997 for Nonesuch, Adams’s label since 1985, for inclusion in the 1999 release The John Adams Earbox, a 10-CD box set retrospective representing nearly all of the composer’s recorded output for the label till then. This recording of Harmonium, performed by the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Chorus (and the only one conducted by the composer) was made available for the first time on a single disc in 2000.

Harmonium, labeled “a glorious tribute to the American transcendentalist spirit” (San Francisco Examiner), is a three-movement piece that calls for large forces and sets texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson. John Adams, in speaking of how he formulated his ideas for the piece, said, ”It began with a vast, empty space and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolved into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound” (from the liner note by Michael Steinberg). In fact, the dynamic range of Harmonium is so broad that it was technically compromised in its first analog recording for LP.

Adams’s tenure with the San Francisco Symphony began in 1977 when he was appointed composer-in-residence, and his work with them continues today. The orchestra has since commissioned a number of important new works, including Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985), El Dorado (1990), and El Niño (A Nativity Oratorio), which premiered at the Châtelet in December 2000 and in San Francisco in January 2001. The significance of the Harmonium commission and Adams’s subsequent and sustained relationship with the orchestra cannot be underestimated. It has served as a model for the way composers and orchestras work in the United States today.

John Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, called “a work that fires the heart” (Newsweek), premiered in Brussels during the final weeks of the Gulf War in 1991, in a production by Peter Sellars. Cast in the form of a prologue, two acts, and an epilogue, it tells the story of the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by four Palestinian commandos,and the subsequent killing of one wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger named Leon Klinghoffer. Adams, in his liner note for the release, says Alice Goodman’s libretto, “maintains without fail a tone of almost Biblical mystery and intensity.” The Choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer, often performed as a concert work, serve to support and articulate the story, standing apart from the action and adding, in the composer's words, “an important dramatic perspective to the more immediate and often violent emotional plane that framed the actual kidnapping story.”