A birthday to celebrate

John Adams will be 60 on Feb. 15. Although most days something by Adams is being performed somewhere, the calendar of upcoming concerts posted on the website of his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, is blank for his birthday.

That doesn’t mean that America’s most performed contemporary classical composer is being overlooked. On Sunday, Adams begins a short residency with the London Symphony Orchestra, which will include a European tour. A birthday festival, Feb. 16-19, will be held in Dublin, sponsored by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.

But a little something local is nice. That little something did happen last weekend, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Pasadena Symphony featured major Adams works conducted by the ensembles’ music directors. Tonight Adams will conduct the Philharmonic’s New Music Group in a Green Umbrella concert of his music.

The weekend’s two major works were “Grand Pianola Music,” performed in Pasadena, and “Naive and Sentimental Music,” which the Philharmonic played for the first time since it premiered the work in 1999.

In the programs, Adams was paired with the masters. “Grand Pianola Music” shared the stage with Mozart’s Wind Serenade, known as “Gran Partita.” “Naive and Sentimental Music” followed Beethoven’s Second Symphony. Common concert wisdom contends that new music must precede old. Otherwise at intermission audiences will flee, hands in the air and mouths open in gaping circles, straight out of Edvard Munch’s “Scream.”

At the Philharmonic’s Sunday matinee at the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, Adams, speaking on stage before “Naive and Sentimental Music,” jokingly introduced himself as “the composer who knocked Beethoven off the second half.” I doubt many minded. On both programs, the biggest cheers were for Adams.

“Grand Pianola Music,” which was written in 1982, has withstood controversy. Shortly after its San Francisco premiere, it was played at a CalArts new music festival, where it generated consternation. The next year the New York Philharmonic included it in a new music festival, and the work was startlingly greeted by booing.

Written for two pianos, winds and lots of percussion, the half-hour concerto ends with a big, bold, catchy tune. The immediate reaction was that Adams, who had begun his career on the non-dogmatic fringes of the avant-garde and then joined the Minimalist camp, had sold out. Adams has said he thought he was being funny.

The truth lies, I suspect, somewhere in the middle. The tune is presented with tongue-in-cheek bombast. But Adams was also clearly enjoying himself. I remember my reaction of slight embarrassment at the CalArts performance. After 15 or 20 minutes of pleasant, glittery Minimalist rippling, the alluringly orchestrated pop music harmonies and rollicking Rachmaninoff-style arpeggios were, indeed, scandalous. I couldn’t shake the tune afterward.

Now I look forward to the tune, happy that more than one kind of music can coexist. Heard in context, with Mozart’s “Gran Partita” on Saturday in Pasadena’s Civic Auditorium, “Grand Pianola Music” sounded surprisingly connected to history. Mozart’s wind serenades were entertainment music, often used as background. But Mozart squeezed in beauty.

The pieces made even more sense together given that Jorge Mester conducted them similarly. His gestures on the podium were grand, but he kept close to the scores, with little interpretive embellishment. The playing was very good. Gloria Cheng and Robert Thies were the outstanding soloists in “Grand Pianola Music.” Mester was in Mozart a fine band master and in Adams clear, careful, alert, expert. But for all the seriousness, I missed a sense of outrage and fun in both composers.

There is danger in taking “Naive and Sentimental Music” too seriously as well. Adams evidently set out to write the great American symphony but backed off. The lofty title, taken from a 1795 philosophical essay by Friedrich Schiller, might be interpreted as a humongous 50-minute defense of “Grand Pianola.”

How to be of his time, to move art forward and to still keep the common touch remained a touchy subject for Adams. But, in fact, through his remarkable growth as an artist over the 17 years between the two works, he found common ground.

A sweet tune cavorts through the first movement in music complex and immediate, naive, sentimental, sophisticated and unpredictable. An electric steel guitar is the center of an ethereal slow movement. The finale is a Minimalism on Bruckner’s scale, a series of thrills that run up the spine.

Sunday afternoon in Segerstrom (the program was also played in Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday night), Esa-Pekka Salonen began the Philharmonic concert with a confident and bold performance of Beethoven’s Second and then took “Naive and Sentimental Music” to new levels of depth, color and immediacy. The score is dedicated to Salonen, and he made it seem like the most important piece on the planet.

The afternoon had a second dedication of significance -- to the memory of Daniel Cariaga, who died in November. Hardly a naive music critic, Cariaga was also seldom sentimental. But I am when it comes to the memory of a valued and beloved member of this newspaper’s staff for three decades. “Naive and Sentimental Music” needed to be a great event, and it was.

mark.swed@latimes.com