Adams: Nixon in China. (Edo de Waart, Orchestra of St. Luke's)

Even in the world of serious music, time moves quickly. Looking back on these beautifully produced recordings of two prominent scores written in the 1980s, we already see them distanced historically from the present. Leonard Bernstein is no longer alive, nor are the four protagonists from the Adams opera: Mao Tse-Tung, Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, and Richard Nixon. Even in his later years, Richard Nixon reached contemporary public consciousness only sporadically. Both of these works represent serious attempts at composing viable contemporary opera at a time when this seemed a difficult undertaking. In more recent years even the Metropolitan Opera has embraced commissions by Philip Glass and John Corigliano, newer politics and concerns are voiced in Anthony Davis's X, and the Adams/Goodman/Sellars team has gone on to create an even more controversial, highly charged work, The Death of Klinghoffer. Now we must look at and listen to these Adams and Bernstein offerings for more enduring values. I certainly believe that we can find them.

At first glance these composers seem to have little in common. They come from different generations and, certainly, their music does not sound the same at all. Yet these scores have basic sociological, dramatic, and musical similarities. Both are attempts to create a viable form of American opera; both had their premieres in Houston, Texas (an American city if ever there was one): the first version of the Bernstein work in 1983 and the Adams work in 1987. Both …