John Adams has been honored with the 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors. "This award represents the greatest honor our nation bestows in opera, and recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to opera in the United States and have become cultural treasures of the nation," says the NEA. Adams's first opera, Nixon in China, will receive its Canadian premiere with the Vancouver Opera next March for the Cultural Olympiad 2010. Also included in the Olympic Games' arts celebration are performances by Kronos Quartet and by Laurie Anderson.
John Adams has been honored with the 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors. "This award represents the greatest honor our nation bestows in opera, and recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to opera in the United States and have become cultural treasures of the nation," says the NEA. Adams and his four fellow recipients—director-librettist Frank Corsaro, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, San Francisco Opera's former general director Lofti Mansouri, and conductor Julius Rudel—will be honored at an award concert at the Harmon Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, on November 14. Additionally, each receives a one-time grant award of $25,000. For more information, visit arts.edow.gov.
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Adams's first opera, Nixon in China, will receive its Canadian premiere next March as part of the celebrations surrounding the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The Vancouver Opera production, led by conductor John DeMain and directed by Michael Cavanaugh, will include four performances at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for the Cultural Olympiad 2010, two months of music, theater, dance, visual arts and more for the Games.
Nixon in China is among the first 20 Cultural Olympiad projects just announced by the event's organizers. Also announced is a one-time performance by Kronos Quartet and Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq of Canadian composer Derek Charke's Tundra Songs at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in January 2010; and a week of performances by Laurie Anderson, featuring a new work, tentatively titled Two-Sided Plays, at the Vancouver Playhouse that February, which the Toronto Globe and Mail says is likely to be "one of the most highly anticipated concerts" of the events.
For more on Cultural Olympiad 2010, visit vancouver2010.
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This past Friday, Kronos Quartet's David Harrington brought scores of musicians and singers together for the 45th-anniversary performance of Terry Riley's In C, in Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium for the first time.
The New York Times's Steve Smith reports: "Emphasizing a communitarian spirit, the Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington gathered 70 diverse performers, including the composers Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov, jazz improvisers, rock musicians, two vocal groups, a recorder quartet, a koto trio and players of invented implements." And in the end, "after 98 minutes of muddy thunder and hypnotic bliss, Mr. Riley and his ad hoc community received a tumultuous ovation." Read the concert review at nytimes.com.
The Village Voice's Andy Beta marvels:
[H]ow rare is the occasion to see indie-rock bands, steel-string guitarists, classical Indian vocalists, children's' choirs, Japanese koto trios, percussion ensembles, European string quartets, and classical Chinese players, convene in one place, all of them in synch? As all of the performers receded into silence—so that the air of Carnegie Hall itself seemed to thrum with the continuing pulsations of "C"—a nearly ten-minute standing ovation roared from the masses.
Read the full review at blogs.villagevoice.com.
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