Journal

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  • Thursday,February 29,2024
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    Girls of the Golden West, John Adams’ eighth music theater work to be released by Nonesuch, is due April 26. The composer leads the LA Phil in this recording made in Disney Hall, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale led by Grant Gershon. You can hear the aria "Wagon Ride," featuring Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock, now. For the opera, which tells the story of the California Gold Rush, longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars drew from original sources from the era—letters, journals, newspaper articles, and familiar song lyrics—to create the libretto. The cast also includes Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny.

    Journal Topics: Album Release, Artist News
  • Wednesday,February 21,2024
    nothing

    The Metropolitan Opera has announced its 2024–25 season, including the Met premiere of John Adams's latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, on May 12, 2025. The adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama stars soprano Julia Bullock, following her company debut in Adams’s El Niño this April, as Cleopatra, opposite bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s Antony. Adams himself conducts a new staging by director Elkhanah Pulitzer, who transports the story from ancient Rome to the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. Performances run through June 7, 2025. 

    Journal Topics: Artist News
  • Monday,November 20,2023
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    “In many ways, John Adams is the quintessential California composer,” Nadia Sirota writes in the introduction to Adams’ audio interview with the California Festival, a statewide initiative showcasing contemporary classical music, including live performances at venues across the state over the past three weeks. Adams, a resident of Northern California since moving there from New England in 1971, talks about his early days in the area and the inspiration behind some of his most influential early works, like Christian Zeal and Activity, Phrygian Gates, Shaker Loops, and Harmonielehre. You can hear what he has to say here.

    Journal Topics: Artist News, Podcast
  • Thursday,August 10,2023
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    Composer John Adams talks about his acclaimed opera Doctor Atomic and the aria “Batter My Heart” in a new video from Boosey & Hawkes. The opera, with a libretto by Peter Sellars drawn from original sources—including, for this aria, the John Donne sonnet—tells the story of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico in July 1945. The video features scenes from the Dutch National Opera production starring Gerald Finley, who originated the role of Oppenheimer in 2005 and can be heard on the Nonesuch first recording of Doctor Atomic, with the composer leading the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Julia Bullock as Kitty Oppenheimer. You can hear “Batter My Heart” from the recording here as well.

    Journal Topics: Artist News, Video
  • Tuesday,June 20,2023
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    The music manuscripts and papers of composer and conductor John Adams have been acquired by the Library of Congress. “The Library of Congress could scarcely conjure a contemporary music collection that carries with it as much recognition and consequence as the manuscripts and papers of John Adams,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “We are proud to count the collection of Adams’ materials among our prized music treasures.” “To have my archives under the care and preservation of the Library of Congress is a great privilege,” said Adams. “Over the years I have visited the Music Division, met their brilliant staff and had the special chance to hold in my hands manuscripts by among others, Brahms, Schoenberg, Bernstein, and Charlie Parker. As an American composer—especially with a name like mine—it seems only right that my own work should be with this great institution.”

    Journal Topics: Artist News
  • Wednesday,March 1,2023
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    The Los Angeles Philharmonic has announced its 2023–24 concert season, and featured among the performers taking the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage in its 20th anniversary season are John Adams, Thomas Adès, Timo Andres, Brad Mehldau, Natalie Merchant, and Cécile McLorin Salvant.

    Journal Topics:
  • Wednesday,February 15,2023
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    Composer John Adams, in two new videos from his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, talks about his early experiences with music and finding his voice as a composer. In the first video, he shares some childhood experiences that led him to want to become a composer. In the second, he recounts a crisis of musical identity he went through in his 20s and 30s and how he found his own musical language, informed by the minimalist pioneers, jazz, Stravinsky, and others.

    Journal Topics: Artist News, Video
  • Wednesday,January 18,2023
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    Composer John Adams, in a new video from his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, discusses how great operas throughout history confront deep issues of our human existence, and how contemporary operas—including his own Doctor Atomic, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Nixon in China—explore themes of humanity, intolerance, and power through the lens of recent history. You can watch it here. All of the above and more are included in the forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works released last year on Nonesuch.  Adams will conduct his opera Girls of the Golden West performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, featuring Julia Bullock among others, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, January 27–29.

    Journal Topics: Artist News, Video
  • Wednesday,July 6,2022
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    "John’s music is about promise and progress," Julia Bullock writes in her note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "It comments on the inherent threat of exploiting power while embodying it. There’s fire and fragility, placed alongside organized form and frequency. I love John’s music. I love singing it, learning from it. And I love listening to it." You can read her complete note from the box set here.

    Journal Topics: Artist Essays, Artist News
  • Tuesday,July 5,2022
    nothing

    "My friendship is with the private John," Nonesuch’s longtime President and current Chairman Emeritus Bob Hurwitz writes in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, "but it is never far from my mind that I am with the man who wrote Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China, Harmonielehre and Naive and Sentimental Music, Scheherazade.2 and Shaker Loops." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

    Journal Topics: Artist News, Staff
  • Friday,July 1,2022
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    The forty-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, is out now on Nonesuch. It includes two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. You can take a look inside in an unboxing video here. Since 1985, when Adams signed exclusively to Nonesuch, the label has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels.

    Journal Topics: Album Release, Artist News, Video
  • Wednesday,June 29,2022
    nothing

    "For a generation of listeners born in the last two decades of the 20th century, the music of John Adams sounded as if it had always been there, a fixed point in a vast musical landscape," Jake Wilder-Smith writes in his note in the new 40-disc box set John Adams Collected Works. "Having already arrived in concert halls and on compact discs before our musical sensibilities began to take shape, this music colored our first impressions of a musical world. But as we grew older, Adams’s music continued to shift and expand. Listening as his work stretched in new directions, we found we had encountered the work of a significant composer in medias res: the narrative firmly established, but still in motion." You can read his complete note from the box set here.

    Journal Topics: Artist News

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