This coupling of two thrilling works by John Adams is the audio equivalent of social media’s current fad for ‘How it started/How it ended’ memes, albeit in reverse, the more recent My Father Knew Charles Ives heard before the earlier Harmonielehre.

John Adams

Described by Adams as “a piece of musical autobiography, an homage and an encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge,” My Father Knew Charles Ives revels in the concatenated collisions of sound that imbue Ives’ music with its kaleidoscopic swirl of fevered, cacophonous activity punctuated by moments of intimate but stirring stillness.

In the resulting sonic maelstrom, leavened by the evocative ‘summer nocturne’ of the middle movement, memories and emotions, fact and fiction become tangled and knotted in allusive music that plays with the head every...