In one fell swoop, Adams displayed both Ravel and Grainger’s enthusiasm for the Balinese gamelan “translated” to the West with Western colouring, and how closely it resembles the original minimal sound.The Canadian composer Colin McPhee (1901-1964), spent extended time in Bali transcribing gamelan music for western instruments, and became hugely influential on the early minimalists in the West Coast through his teaching at the University of California. Few of his works survive, but the three-movement Tabuh-Tabuhan toccata for orchestra and two pianos (1936) is proto Steve Reich – and an extraordinarily successful synthesis of Western orchestral sound and gamelan.American popular music is never far from Adams. In Songs of Ragtime and Reminiscence, Audra McDonald was a captivating soprano soloist in settings orchestrated by Adams and William David Brohn of songs by Charles Ives, Hughie Cannon, Gershwin, Charles K Harris and Irving Berlin. Cannon’s “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” with its jaunty banjo and tuba brought the house down.This was a European premi?, as were two pieces by John Adams himself. “Easter Eve 1945″ afforded a snatch preview of Adams’ “opera in preparation”, Doctor Atomic, which takes as its subject the building in America of the atomic bomb. McDonald was again the soloist in this powerfully rapturous piece.Adams frequently comments that his works come in twos: “serious” and “the trickster” The Dharma at Big Sur is definitely in the latter category.

Written to open the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, it’s a rhapsody for electric violin and orchestra. Soloist Tracy Silverman soared over the orchestra in apparently Indian/notated-jazz improvisation which, oddly, denied both freedom and spontaneity. Booking: 020-7589 8212; Prom 49 online to Sunday. Four years ago, the Stuttgart Opera brought Handel’s Alcina to the Edinburgh Festival The producers were Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito It was a killer. It’s still joked about in the bars and bistros of the Scottish capital.

Not content with making fools of the poor people of Stuttgart, they have now pitched their tents in Hanover, where they have done their worst with Debussy’s visionary Pell? et M?sande.Their technique is to take every stage direction, every word sung, and every gesture of the orchestra, and systematically ignore it Luckily, Maeterlinck’s play is lucid and crystalline But there is an aesthetic question here. When the soldiers came we were so scared – nobody knew what was going on and there was shouting and firing…” She stops and briefly shuts her eyes before finishing: “Then the soldiers, they set fire to the tents. It was terrible.”The story behind the massacre in Gatumba is one of responsibility and ethnic conflict. They had come here to the Burundian border seeking respite from the war that continues to ravage the DRC, hoping if not for peace then at least for a temporary rest from the horrors they have grown up with for most of their lives.