John Adams will be a featured composer of the Barbican Centre's 2009–10 season in a special John Adams Focus series next year. It will include six Adams works over six performances next February to July, featuring four UK premieres and two concerts with the composer leading the London Symphony Orchestra. The Times (UK) talks to Adams about his operas, with Doctor Atomic set to receive its UK premiere by the English National Opera next week.
John Adams, who celebrated his 62nd birthday this past weekend, will be a featured composer of the Barbican Centre's 2009–10 season through a special John Adams Focus series, February to July 2010. The esteemed London venue has just announced the season's lineup for the Great Performers programs forming the core of its classical music season, and includes six Adams works over six performances next spring.
As part of the Focus, baritone Thomas Hampson and the New York Philharmonic, led by conductor Alan Gilbert, will perform Adams's The Wound-Dresser along with works by Haydn, Schubert, and Berg, on February 4, 2010; Emanuel Ax will give the UK premiere, on March 5, of a new work for solo piano written for him. On March 25, the St. Lawrence String Quartet will give the UK premiere of Adams's String Quartet, at LSO St. Luke's.
The composer will lead the London Symphony Orchestra in two concerts, one featuring the UK premiere of his revised Doctor Atomic Symphony on March 7, and the other the UK premiere of the new Los Angeles Philharmonic commission for Gustavo Dudamel, City Noir.
In July 2010, the Barbican and Theatre Royal Stratford East will present a new production of his theatrical piece I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky on the main stage of Theatre Royal, reimagined from 1994 Los Angeles to 21st-century East London.
For more information on John Adams Focus, visit barbican.org.uk.
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Adams is the subject of a feature article in The Times (UK) focusing on the composer's operas, and the controversy sparked by some. The English National Opera is set to give Adams's 2005 work Doctor Atomic its UK premiere, starring the originator of the J. Robert Oppenheimer role, Gerald Finley, at the London Coliseum next week.
Times writer Richard Morrison calls Adams first opera, Nixon in China, "a brilliantly funny, dark and eventually elegiac piece of modern mythology," and introduces Doctor Atomic by writing: "Probably only one composer in the world has the imagination, technical ability and sheer theatrical effrontery to finish an opera with a depiction of an atomic explosion."
Read the article at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk.
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