John Luther Adams reviews

The first recording of John Luther Adams’s magnificent, meditative single-movement work Become Ocean proved a much-justified sensation in 2014. This disc of mostly chamber works is quite different in scale, featuring compositions for string quartet and cello ‘choir’, and offers a more intimate account of the composer’s affinity with the natural world.

‘Listening to it we become ocean,’ wrote John Cage on the music of friend and fellow radical Lou Harrison. John Luther Adams neatly invokes Cage’s epithet in Become Ocean, a wondrous and tumultuous single-movement work for large orchestra that affirms music’s capacity to shift our very state of being, while also conveying an urgent and unsentimental ecological message.