In June 2022 Nonesuch Records will release the 40-disc “John Adams Collected Works,” a box set spanning four decades of his music including all of his operas, orchestral and chamber music. Of his first opera, The New Yorker Magazine said, “Not since Porgy and Bess has an American opera won such universal acclaim as Nixon in China.”Ī winner of numerous Grammy awards, Adams’ music is exceptionally well represented on recordings. ![]() In 1985, Adams began a collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars that has resulted in three decades of groundbreaking operas and oratorios: Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), both to libretti by Alice Goodman, El Niño (2000), Doctor Atomic (2005), A Flowering Tree (2006), The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012) and Girls of the Golden West (2017). ![]() Many of Adams’s landmark orchestral works were written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, including Harmonium (1981), Grand Pianola Music (1982), Harmonielehre (1985) and Absolute Jest (2012).Ĭarl Adams, with Ed Murphy and his Orchestra in the 1930s After earning two degrees from Harvard, he moved to Northern California in 1971 and has since lived in the San Francisco Bay area.Įlinore Adams, with the Russ Cole Band in the 1930sĪdams taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years before becoming composer-in-residence of the San Francisco Symphony (1982-85), and creator of the orchestra’s highly successful and controversial “New and Unusual Music” series. The intellectual and artistic traditions of New England, including his studies at Harvard University and attendance at Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, helped shape him as an artist and thinker. He began composing at age ten and heard his first orchestral pieces performed while still a teenager. Over the past 40 years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings.īorn and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music.
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