Speaking (posting) as I was about recently classical music that I like, the BBC is now playing, live from Bournemouth, The Chairman Dances, by John Adams, a terrific piece. The Bournemouth Symphony is being conducted by their permanent supremo Ms Marin Alsopp. It's a terrific piece, and one of the few popular hits that has recently added itself to the repertoire. It's the opening number of a concert that will later feature the Tcaikovksy 1st Piano Concerto and the Brahms 2nd Symphony. What is more, the audience will now be enjoying it just as much as I am. This is no mere sit-through-the-ghastly-modern-rubbish-until-the-real-music-starts music. This is music-music. It is occupying the spot where they might instead have been playing Beethoven's Egmont Overture or perhaps a Haydn symphony, and it is not at all out of place.

If you don't know what it sounds like, well, it's the kind of music they play in TV documentaries when they're trying to communicate how rapidly some rapidly developing city has been rapidly developing, by showing speeded up traffic at night, and vast floors full of flickering computer screens, suggestive of electronic money wizzing hither and thither.

The piece is a orchestral revamp of music from Adams' opera Nixon in China, which, along with Akhnaten by Philip Glass is one of the few recent (i.e. my lifetime) operas I an actually enjoy.

The Chairman in question is Chairman Mao, and I shudder to think what fatuous political misjudgements the piece embodies, what with Adams being a darling of the US Bush-despising classes, whom I in my turn despise for despising Bush. (By now Adams has probably done some ghastly piece about 9/11 which oozes moral equivalence if not worse.) But the piece, which is subtitled a 'foxtrot', sounds great, and I don't care.

Nixon in China was completed in 1985, so it definitely gets in under the wire put in place by Alan Little. Akhnaten was finished in 1987.