John Adams
conductor
Composer, conductor, and creative thinker — John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. His operas and oratorios such as Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, and El Niño have transformed the genre of contemporary music theater. Spanning more than three decades, works such as Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, The Dharma at Big Sur, and his Violin Concerto are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music.
As a conductor Adams has led the world’s major orchestras, programming his own works with a wide variety of repertoire ranging from Beethoven, Mozart, and Debussy to Sibelius, Ives, Carter, Philip Glass, and Ellington. Conducting engagements in 2023–24 include return visits to The Cleveland Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, performances with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and the European premiere of his new opera Antony and Cleopatra at the Teatre del Liceu. Other recent engagements include performances of Girls of the Golden West with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Death of Klinghoffer with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, and appearances with the St. Louis Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich.
A provocative writer, he is author of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Since 2009 Adams has been creative chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Among his honorary doctorates are those from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, and Cambridge universities and from The Juilliard School. In 2021 he was appointed Honorary Academician by the prestigious General Assembly of the Academicians of Santa Cecilia, and also received the Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University.
In honor of Adams’s 75th birthday in 2022, Nonesuch Records released the 40-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label. Also available is the Berlin Philharmonic’s John Adams Edition, a CD and DVD collection comprising seven of his works, conducted by Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Kirill Petrenko, Alan Gilbert, and Adams himself.