Classical home listening: John Adams Collected Works

Man for all seasons… John Adams, pictured in Rome in 2018. Photograph: Musacchio-Ianniello-Pasqualini

• Stravinsky was loyal to Columbia, Britten to Decca, Stockhausen to Deutsche Grammophon. Composers’ relationships with record labels are more than a commercial matter: they act as an invaluable archive for posterity. The American composer John Adams (b.1947) signed exclusively with Nonesuch in 1985, at the start of his career. Now the company has issued a 40-disc box set of all his recorded works across four decades (including five recordings from other labels, such as Yuja Wang playing the piano concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon).