This past weekend, Chicago Opera Theater began India Blooms in Chicago, its monthlong festival of Indian culture in preparation for the May 14 Midwest premiere of John Adams's latest opera, A Flowering Tree. The work features a libretto by Adams and his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars, adapted from an ancient southern Indian folktale and poetry translated by the late A. K. Ramanujan, a scholar at the University of Chicago. The composer will conduct the May 14 Chicago premiere and the succeeding performance, on May 17; three more performances will follow; all will take place at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park.

New York magazine celebrates its 40th year with a special anniversary issue. In it, the magazine's culture critics give their take on the most essential New York works of art since the publication's inception, "The New York Canon: 1968-2008," featuring performances and works by Steve Reich, John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Audra McDonald, Adam Guettel, Stephen Sondheim, David Byrne, Brian Eno, and The Magnetic Fields.

Nonesuch wishes John Adams a very happy birthday today. He'll be in town this weekend for the New York premiere of his Doctor Atomic Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday. The work is based on orchestral music from Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, which depicts the final hours leading to the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, led by David Robertson, will perform the piece; the ensemble gave the North American premiere last week in St. Louis. 

When Kronos Quartet returns to Carnegie Hall next month, the group will give the world premiere performance of Fernando Otero's El Cerezo (The Cherry Tree), which the Argentinean-born composer wrote for Kronos. The program for the February 22 concert in Zankel Hall will also feature the first public performance of John Adams's Fellow Traveler, which the composer wrote at Kronos' request for Peter Sellars's 50th birthday and the New York premiere of Clint Mansell's Requiem for a Dream Suite.

Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, has posted on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, his Apex 07 list—some of the best performances and recordings he's heard this year. Among the best on CD: Wilco's "On and On and On," from Sky Blue Sky. And among his favorite performances of 2007 are the Disney Hall performance of John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic, and Audra McDonald in a Valentine's Day performance of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at LA Opera.

John Adams’s Doctor Atomic will receive its Chicago premiere when it opens this Friday at the Lyric Opera. Peter Sellars, the opera’s director and librettist, recently spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune about the piece. Doctor Atomic examines the events leading up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb. It goes behind the scenes of the Manhattan Project, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists worked under the pressures and the paranoia of the Cold War to launch the bomb and, subsequently, the Nuclear Age.

Alarm Will Sound gave the world premiere performance of John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony last weekend at Stanford University, and the reviews continue to roll in. The San Francisco Chronicle, calls the new piece “vivacious,” writing that it “bursts with the technical prowess and cogent wit of the composer's finest efforts.” The Financial Times points to the group's prowess in pulling off the "dangerously exhilarating" piece with aplomb. The San Jose Mercury News praises "the crackerjack new-music ensemble."

This past Friday, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at Stanford University, and, writes Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Swed, the piece is "a chip off the old block." The composer wrote his original Chamber Symphony in 1992 while studying Schoenberg and overhearing the Carl Stalling–penned score coming from the Looney Tunes cartoons his son was watching in the other room, but the new piece, writes Swed, "is pure Adams."

This Friday night, Alarm Will Sound will make its Stanford University debut with the world premiere of John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, which the composer wrote for the innovative ensemble. Adams's first Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at The Hague in 1993. Also on Friday's program at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium are works by Conlon Nancarrow, Michael Gordon, and Aphex Twin. 

On Friday night, London's Barbican Centre celebrated John Adams's 60th birthday in style. For the occasion, Adams conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a program featuring his own Choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer. BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting the concert on today's Performance on 3 program and will continue to stream the performance online for the next seven days.

John Adams's new opera, A Flowering Tree, will be premiered at the Barbican in London this weekend. Listen to John discuss the piece in an interview on BBC Radio 3.

John Adams has made the San Francisco Chronicle's society page, on the occasion of his 60th birthday and the forthcoming US premiere of his latest opera, A Flowering Tree, with Adams leading the San Francisco Symphony, beginning March 1.