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Orchestras have thrown themselves on this year’s anniversary of American Independence (or “Freedom 250” as the marketers are catchily dubbing it) with an eagerness born of a repertoire of big names and broad appeal. A year of Gershwin, Barber and Bernstein, Adams and Glass? Full halls all round. You can even throw in John Williams and Duke Ellington (just go easy on the Carter and Crumb) and you’re on to a winner. Just ask Kazuki Yamada and the audience of Friday night’s generously filled Symphony Hall.

Harmonium – John Adams’ 1980 landmark experiment in maximal minimalism – was the advertised centrepiece (and will travel down to the Proms with the CBSO later this month), but the framing was the curiosity here: conceived by Yamada as two facing musical panels.

How elegant to run the craggy monumentality of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man straight into the composer’s Lincoln Portrait. The president’s own words (delivered with poised emphasis by soprano Janai Brugger) sitting against a misty backdrop of middle-distance strings and yearning woodwind solos. Beautifully balanced and paced, it was enough to stir a hall of Limeys to borrowed patriotism.

The parallel sequence prefaced the European premiere of Florence Price’s 1941 song-cycle The Heart of A Woman (newly orchestrated by Lior Rosner) with Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1987). Noisier than the Copland, the Tower is an unapologetic feminist statement, a musical refusal to apologise for taking up space in the classical concert hall. Thematically it was the perfect curtain-raiser for the Price; stylistically it was a judder from boisterous modernity to parlour sentimentality steered by texts of cloying, coupleted sweetness, many by Langston Hughes.

The cycle is Price on the cusp of music theatre – tipping over almost entirely into Broadway in the flirtatious, up-beat “Don’t you tell me no”, giving us the full glorious Technicolor in the rhapsodic “My dream” and gleaming fantasy “To my little son”. It’s all pleasant enough, especially when richly sung by Brugger, but the additional orchestral scale puts a pressure on these miniatures that their slight substance can’t really support.

From micro to macro in the thrilling scale of the Adams. Harmonium is essentially a concerto for choir and orchestra, a not-so-short ride in a machine that bends time: freeze-framing it in “Because I could not stop for Death”; fast-forwarding dizzily in “Wild Nights”. Yamada’s incisive energy is a good fit, but as yet the CBSO Chorus feel timid, on the back of the beat. Bring on the Proms and the full sonic juggernaut.