John Adams

Composer, conductor and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both symphonic and operatic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Compositions from four decades, such as “Harmonielehre”, “Shaker Loops”, the “Chamber Symphony”, the “Doctor Atomic Symphony”, “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” and his Violin Concerto, have not only established themselves in the repertoire but are now among some of the most frequently performed works of the present day. John Adams’s stage works, created in collaboration with Peter Sellars, include “Nixon in China” (1987), “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), “El Niño” (2000), “Doctor Atomic” (2005), “A Flowering Tree” (2006), “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012), “Girls of the Golden West” (2017) and “Antony and Cleopatra” (2022). 
John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947 and began composing at the age of ten. The first performances of his early orchestral pieces took place while he was still a teenager. After graduating from Harvard University, where the budding composer was taught, among others, by the Schönberg pupil Leon Kirchner, Adams moved to Northern California in 1971 and has lived in the San Francisco Bay area ever since. Alongside numerous other awards, he has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, the Juilliard School in New York, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music. His choral work “On the Transmigration of Souls”, which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to commemorate the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Last season “El Niño” was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in a production by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and “Antony and Cleopatra” received its European premiere in Barcelona, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. Simon Rattle also conducted the world premiere of Adams’s new orchestral work Frenzy on a European tour with the London Symphony Orchestra. In the 2024/25 season, “Nixon in China” will be performed in repertoire at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in the production by Franziska Kronfoth & Julia Lwowski.
As a conductor, John Adams, who has held the position of Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, has worked with numerous prestigious orchestras including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestras of Seattle, Cincinnati, Atlanta and Toronto, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berliner Philharmoniker. In the spring of 2025, John Adams will conduct the Münchner Philharmoniker and the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera New York.