I Am Love, the film to which John Adams has contributed his first-ever score, has been nominated for a Hollywood World Award for best international film; the Los Angeles Times says the score "adds a staggering emotional punch" to the film. The Times review of Sunday's LA Master Chorale performance of Klinghoffer Choruses calls Adams "an American icon" and the opera's music as "some of the most haunting Adams has written." The composer delivers the Tanner Lectures on Human Values next week at Yale.
John Adams has contributed his first-ever film score, to Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), the new film by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, starring Tilda Swinton. The film drew considerable attention at the Toronto Film Festival last month and has now been nominated for the Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards’ Hollywood World Award for best international film.
The award's jury chair Mike Goodridge said that the nominated films "are not just among the best international films, but the best films made this year." The winning film will be announced at a gala event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles this Monday, October 26. For more on the award, visit hollywoodawards.com.
Following the Toronto Film Festival screenings in September, the Hollywood Reporter said of the film that "best of all is the score, the first-ever by acclaimed minimalist musician John Adams (Nixon in China), whose orchestral compositions run counter to the scenes. Dramatic moments are accompanied by light, almost frivolous music, the routine of everyday life by deep, somber tones.” The Los Angeles Times's Mark Olsen said "the pulsing, buzzing orchestral music by John Adams adds a staggering emotional punch" to the film.
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This past Sunday night, the choruses from Adams's 1990 opera The Death of Klinghoffer were performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a sold-out performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The opera from which the choruses were culled, about the 1984 taking of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian hijackers, elicited a considerable amount of controversy upon its premiere in 1991, but, says Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed, "much has changed since 1991."
Time has allowed for a fuller understanding of the opera's content, and Adams has become "an American icon ... Audiences love him and trust him." What remains is the music, which Swed describes as "some of the most haunting Adams has written." And given all that has not changed in the world in the past two decades, "this opera's importance and relevance was unavoidable."
Read the concert review at latimes.com.
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Next week, Adams will be at Yale University to deliver the 2009 Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The lectures were established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, who hoped they would contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind. The first talk, “Doctor Faustus and His Composition: Reflections on Thomas Mann’s Fictional Composer,” will be held on October 28, and the second, “Doctor Atomic and His Gadget: Composing the American Mythology,” on October 29. Both are free and open to the public and will take place at 4:30 PM at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center in New Haven. For more information, visit yale.edu or John Adams's website, earbox.com.
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