By Jonathan Blumhofer

The performance of John Adams’s City Noir is swift and characterful, though sometimes pushed perhaps a bit too hard for its own good. The rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade is clear but a bit too safe.

Violinist James Ehnes’ discography is so extensive that it was only a question of when he’d get around to recording Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, not if. What’s more striking about his new recording with Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) is that it pairs Bernstein’s 1954 effort with John Williams’ Violin Concerto No. 1.

The Williams dates from the mid-‘70s and was written right after the untimely death of his first wife, the actress Barbara Ruick. Its brooding, volatile aspect perhaps owes something to that context – the central “Slowly in peaceful concentration” unfolds like an elegiac barcarolle – though this is hardly funereal music.

In fact, the Concerto marked a turning point in Williams’ concert music, allowing him to cultivate what he called the “Romantic [Atonal], but in an American way”-style he’d long been striving for. Though it lacks the easy tunefulness and immediacy of his best film music, there’s a there’s a motivic rigor here that’s straight out of the Brahms-Schoenberg line and the writing for violin and orchestra is thoroughly idiomatic.

If Ehnes’ performance doesn’t quite persuade that this is a great, neglected masterpiece, it’s at least exceptionally well played and draws out the tight thematic relationships between each movement. The Canadian violinist makes the most of the introspective spots – the middle movement, the reflective episode in the center of the finale, especially – while also suffusing its bravura passagework with purpose and direction.

Denève and the SLSO are right with him, teasing out the music’s gentle echoes of Hollywood and sometimes mercurial shifts of character with surety and ease.

They make for an impressive combination, too, in the Bernstein. Take or leave the score’s programmatic allusions to Plato’s Symposium: the Serenade is one of the American composer’s freshest and most satisfying concert works.

Here, Ehnes plays with gorgeous tone – the clarity of his bow arm is just marvelous, as is his left hand’s ability to cleanly and purposefully get the music’s knotty double and triple stops to sing. Over the Serenade’s first three movements, too, there’s a strong sense of shape and propulsion: this is well-focused, graceful, spry Bernstein.

Yet over its last two movements, fervency sometimes lags. “Agathon” builds to a big climax, though its intensity level is dialed down. Ditto for the finale which, when the “Alcibiades” music gets rolling, dances with less abandon than Bernstein infused this section in his own recordings (with Gidon Kremer, Zino Francescati, or Glenn Dicterow) or Hilary Hahn did in hers.

True, the coda takes off like a rocket and there’s a welcome mix of pungency and vitality throughout from the SLSO’s string and percussion sections (the big introduction to the finale, in particular, soars). Still, for all its clarity, this Serenade feels a bit safer than it should.

John Adams’s City Noir has been pretty well represented on disc in the fifteen years since its 2009 premiere: Marin Alsop’s new recording of the score with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony is the work’s fourth. In general, this celebration of the city of Los Angeles benefits from her approach. It’s swift and characterful, though sometimes pushed perhaps a bit too hard for its own good.

So, while the opening “The City and its Double” might sometimes benefit from a bit more room to breathe, its structure emerges nicely intact in Alsop’s hands. The central “The Song is for You” boasts a series of idiomatic solos (especially from alto saxophone and trombone), at times seeming to channel Gershwin.

And, though the Berlin Philharmonic brought a bit more refinement and freedom to their account of the closing “Boulevard Night,” the ORF’s woodwinds, trumpets, and jazz drummer really shine here. By about any measure, this is some brash and chill Adams.

Even more welcome is the pairing’s account of Fearful Symmetries, a half-hour-long study in rhythm and texture that’s only been recorded once before. Granted, that earlier release was led by the composer and it’s aged well.

But Alsop’s new take is downright invigorating. The conductor brings a strong sense of drive to the music, drawing out a beautiful blend of colors – from invitingly swooning saxophone quartet playing to unexpected synthesizer colors – from her forces. What’s more, hers is a reading that manages to vigorously illuminate the sophistication of Adams’s compositional language, circa 1988. It’s a keeper.

Rounding things out is the premiere recording of Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance, an extract from Adams’s 2017 opera Girls of the Golden West. If you can imagine a shorter, American “Dance of the Seven Veils” minus the sumptuousness and melodic memorability of Richard Strauss, you’ve got some sense of this miniature. Though not the most compelling thing Adams has written, the ORF’s performance of it is nevertheless rhythmically and stylistically secure.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.