Harmonium / The Klinghoffer Choruses

John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947 and graduated from Harvard University in 1971. He moved to California where he taught and conducted at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for ten years. His innovative concerts led to his appointment firstly as contemporary music adviser to the San Francisco symphony, and then as the orchestra's composer-in-residence between 1979 and 1985, the period in which his reputation became established with the success of such works as Harmonium and Harmonielehre. Recordings on the New Albion and ECM labels were followed in 1986 by an exclusive contract with Nonesuch Records, an association the continues today.

Of John Adam's compositions, the best known and most widely discussed is his opera Nixon in China, the composer, along with director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris, brought contemporary history vividly into the opera house, pioneering and entire genre of post-modern music theater. The original staging of the work by Sellars has subsequently been seen in New York, Washington, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Low Angeles, Paris, Adelaide, and Frankfurt. New productions of the opera have been presented in Helsinki (in Finnish) and Bielefeld (in German).

Adams' second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, again a collaboration with Sellars, Goodman, and Morris, had its premiere at the Brussels Opera in 1991. Described by Newsweek critic Katrine Ames as "a work that fires the heart," it has also been seen in Lyon, Vienna, New York and San Francisco. A recording of the opera, conducted by Kent Nagano, has been released on Nonesuch.

His newest stage work is a collaboration with Peter Sellars and librettist June Jordan; entitled I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, it is described by its creators as a "song play", scored for seven singers and an onstage band of eight instrumentalists. Ceiling/ Sky, which made its debut in Berkeley in May 1995, has since been performed in Montreal, New York, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris, and hamburg; according to Michael Walsh of Time, the work "contains many moments of rare and innovative beauty."

Initially known as a Minimalist, Adams has in his mature work harnessed the rhythmic energy of Minimalism to the harmonies and orchestral colors of late-Romanticism. Concurrently he has introduced references to a wide range of 20th-century idioms-- both "popular" and "serious"--in works such as his two operas and the wittily eclectic orchestral piece Fearful Symmetries, which touches on Stravinsky, Honegger, and big-band swing music.