MAY FESTIVAL COVER STORY
John Adams, composer and conductor, discusses his El Niño by Hannah Edgar
The last time John Adams conducted the May Festival Chorus was on a CSO concert in 2008, for his own 2008 John Adams. Credit: Musacchio Ianniello Pasqualini On the Transmigration of Souls, composed in memory of those who died on Have you sung in a chorus yourself? September 11. The work won the 2003 Pulitzer This will probably come as no surprise to singers Prize for Music and immediately secured a vaunted who struggle with my choral writing, but I’ve place in the 21st-century canon. Even so, Adams never sung in a chorus or taken voice lessons. found himself frustrated by live performances of Nonetheless, I love the sound of massed voices. Transmigration, feeling they rarely cohered the My first commission as a young composer was work’s acoustic and prerecorded elements. from the San Francisco Symphony, for a work That May Festival performance helped confor chorus and orchestra. If they’d known how vince him otherwise. “The pure American quality little experience I’d had with chorus, I’m sure of their enunciation and their perfectly balanced they wouldn’t have proposed that. But they did, sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the and the piece that resulted was Harmonium, a words to a transcendental level, and for once the work which after 30 years continues to get a lot piece did not seem as compromised and uneven of performances. as I had previously thought,” Adams later wrote So…what can I say? Beginner’s luck? All of my in his memoir. operas and oratorios have large choral forces Adams returns to conduct his bilingual operainvolved. In fact, Nixon in China, The Death of oratorio El Niño (2000)—“one of my favorite Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic all start with pieces,” he admits. Hard at work on Antony choruses. and Cleopatra, his latest opera debuting in San Francisco this fall, Adams answered questions What works do you gravitate towards via email. conducting? I consider it a privilege to be able to make You started conducting very young, while you programs around my music. When I did my were still a teenager. Did you formally study Absolute Jest in Vienna a few years ago, a piece conducting with anyone? for string quartet and orchestra based on fragThe only “lessons” I had were during one summer ments of Beethoven, they asked me to pair it at a music festival; my teacher had been a pupil with a Beethoven symphony. So, there I was, of the great Nadia Boulanger. Other than that, I doing something I’d never in my life imagined: learned a lot about conducting from playing in conducting my favorite Beethoven, the Fourth orchestras. I was often called to substitute in the Symphony, in Vienna! clarinet section of the Boston Symphony when Likewise, I do 20th-century music that speaks to I was in college, so early in my career I learned me on a very deep level: Sibelius, Ravel, Debussy, firsthand what orchestra players appreciate (a Bartók, Stravinsky, Copland and, of course, the good upbeat, helpful cues, efficient rehearsing, music of my colleagues Steve Reich and Philip don’t waste their time) and what they dislike Glass. And all through my 40-plus years of per(conductors who haven’t prepared, who talk too forming I have done many premieres by young much, or who keep stopping). composers, several of whom are now making real waves.
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