While 2008 may go down as one of the more turbulent years in recent (or distant) memory, or, more optimistically, a time of change, there is much to celebrate in the year in music. Nonesuch artists across all genres have contributed to that and, accordingly, have made their way onto many critics' lists of the year's best. For the final Nonesuch Journal article of the year, we offer an overview of just some of that year-end critical praise.

Beginning tonight, the PBS series Independent Lens will broadcast Wonders Are Many, the 2007 documentary film that captures the making of John Adams's 2004-05 opera, Doctor Atomic. The film goes behind the scenes to examine both the creation of this monumental work, leading to its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera House, and the working relationship between the longtime collaborators Adams and Sellars.

John Adams's A Flowering Tree and Kronos Quartet's The Cusp of Magic have been named among NPR's Top 10 classical CDs of 2008, the latter a seamless blend of Eastern and Western influences, the former demonstrating the power of Adams's "imaginative musical language." Audiophile Audition gives A Flowering Tree five stars and exclaims: "John Adams has produced a masterwork." With this "shimmering soundscape," Adams has written "some of the most purely gorgeous music of recent years," all captured on this "beautifully recorded" album. "Most strongly recommended!"

Even with all the critical acclaim and analysis John Adams and his work have received over the years, writes LA Weekly in recommending the composer's new memoir, "if you know Adams’ music—really know it—it may not surprise you to discover that everything written up to now is puny, indeed, besides the guy, and what he has to say about himself." In the book, Adams shows "what it takes to compose great music, serious music that can reach out and touch people importantly" while transcending other memoirs with "this intense, immensely charming and revealing work."

The Met premiere production of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic concluded last Thursday; this weekend, the Atlanta Symphony will give a staged production of the piece. Tonight, the composer is at Harvard to lead a performance of The Wound-Dresser, followed by a discussion. The Boston Globe talks with the composer about this "particularly rich time" in his life, as "one of America's busiest and most original composers" and features a review of Adams's memoir, Hallelujah Junction, that concludes: "[T]his is a book that any aspiring artist, in any medium, should read as a kind of how-to guide to achieving artistic success without losing integrity, something that seems to many young artists today nearly impossible. In fact, it is a book for anyone who wants to create something—including a self."

John Adams's memoir, Hallelujah Junction, is now available in the UK. The Independent calls it "engaging" and says that like Adams's musical work of the same name, the book "radiates a calm, Californian confidence, letting its ideas unfold at a gentle pace." The parallels continue: "Adams's unique touch finds its literary analogue in a style of rare precision." The composer "here emerges as a storyteller."

Following its Met premiere earlier this month, John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic was described as the composer's "most complex and masterly music" by the New York Times and "hauntingly powerful, deeply humane and eloquent" by the Boston Globe. This Saturday's matinee will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world through The Met: Live in HD, which reaches close to 800 screens. Met General Manager Peter Gelb tells the Boston Herald: "I was determined to bring [Adams] to the company. Taking advantage of that with new media just adds to the experience."

The Seattle Times calls John Adams's new memoir, Hallelujah Junction, "as lively as his music," concluding: "[I]t's the range of Adams's musical appetites and intellectual hunger that leaves the strongest impression. This is a man who swallows whole new worlds with every fresh project he takes on—and makes his discoveries new for the rest of us."

John Adams is the subject of a feature article and interview posted today on Salon.com, about Adams's "pretty marvelous book," Hallelujah Junction, and everything from his "bold and blissful work" Harmonielehre to the "electric" new production of Doctor Atomic at the Met. Says Salon: "[A]fter reading Hallelujah Junction, and learning how he consistently challenged himself to go deeper into and wider into music, and himself, it's easy to see how Adams has earned his spot on the A-List of living composers." With Doctor Atomic, writes The Times (UK), the composer "has written his most eclectic and boldest score."

Hallelujah Junction, the two-disc collection of select tracks by John Adams, earns four stars in The Independent. The composer's "charming and illuminating memoir" of the same name, says the New York Times Sunday Book Review, "is a cogent account of its author’s escape from the world of ­audience-alienating 'process' music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist ... There is no more self-aggrandizement in this wry, smart and forthright memoir than there is in the venturesome but elegiac music of Adams’s maturity. Indeed, Hallelujah Junction stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures."

John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic received its Met premiere last week. The opera tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb and the man behind it, J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York magazine says that "Adams has written his finest work" with this "darkly riveting" opera and its "score of microscopic clarity and panoramic sweep." The Star-Ledger praises conductor Alan Gilbert, who "led a performance of precision and expressiveness, bringing the score's harmonic piquancy, metrical complexity, and textural detail together as a visceral rush." The Washington Post says one of the opera's "moments of rich beauty" is the duet between Oppenheimer and his wife, in which "the score is so purely gorgeous it could make you cry."

With this week's Met premiere of John Adams's 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, the Boston Globe calls the work "a hauntingly powerful, deeply humane and eloquent work" and praises Adams's score as "some of his most compelling and imaginative music to date," one that "weds a cool Stravinskian precision and rhythmic vitality with a kind of seething Wagnerian dread." The Philadelphia Inquirer calls it "a profound musical and moral journey" in which the composer "surpasses his considerable self ..." The opera and its premiere are the focus of today's episode of WNYC's Soundcheck.