Girls of the Golden West album review — John Adams’s gold rush opera gets a first-rate recording

With eight diverse works that have been staged as operas to his name, John Adams stands as arguably the foremost opera composer of his generation. Girls of the Golden West, first performed in 2017, is not the most recent (Antony and Cleopatra premiered in 2022) but it is good to see it getting its first recording.

This performance derives from concerts given by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Adams himself conducting. An opera that met with mixed reviews has been trimmed to just over two hours in this latest revision and is played here with tremendous pizzazz.

The setting is the 19th-century California gold rush. For better or worse, director Peter Sellars assembled a compendium libretto from the first-hand accounts of miners and others at the time, viewing this memorable chapter of the American nation-building legend through a 21st-century lens. The three main commentators in the male-dominated mining community are women, and racial tensions are a central theme.

All that gives Adams’s opera a fresh and contemporary angle, but the lack of a strong narrative remains a problem. However vividly the down-to-earth style of the music and modern settings of gold-rush songs capture the atmosphere, they feel like scene-setting in search of a drama.

Most of the leading roles are taken by the same singers — Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Ryan McKinny — as at the premiere and all are excellent. Maybe this newly revised version will work more cogently in the opera house. If not, we at least have a first-rate recording of it.

★★★☆☆

‘John Adams: Girls of the Golden West’ is released by Nonesuch