Credits:

Berliner Philharmonic Orchestra

Description:

[Adams makes his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic]Harmonielehre and Scheherazade.2 conducted by Adams himself, recorded when he appeared as a guest with the Berlin Philharmonic at Musikfest Berlin in September 2016 – an occasion that also marked his debut as a conductor with the orchestra. Harmonielehre, premiered in 1985, was inspired by a dream of the composer’s own, in which “a huge container ship in San Francisco Bay took off into the sky like a spacecraft”; the opening hammers out E minor chords like a gun salute. The violin concerto Scheherazade.2 was prompted by an exhibition devoted to the Thousand and One Nights at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and in particular by an image of Scheherazade there. “The casual brutality toward women set me thinking about the news images we encounter almost daily, and out of that came the idea of writing a dramatic