As many who were there recall all too painfully, the world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2017 was a crashing bore: too many narratives, too little focus. If John Adams has trimmed the score in the meantime, we haven’t gotten the memo. That said, Girls of the Golden West—packaged as a historically informed corrective to the Belasco and Puccini spaghetti Western La Fanciulla del West—had music to burn. Much of the best of it fell to the sparkling Julia Bullock as the plucky memoirist Dame Shirley. She’s back for this concert edition/live recording session, alongside fellow original-cast members Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, and Ryan McKinny. Grant Gershon, who conducted in San Francisco, cedes the podium to the composer but remains involved in his capacity as artistic director of the Los Angeles Chorale. —Matthew Gurewitsch