John Adams Opera Choruses Published as Multi-Volume Collection
B&H is pleased to present a three-volume collection of John Adams’s opera choruses with piano accompaniment, including choral selections from Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and more.
Volume 1 features choral selections from Adams’s two oratorios, based on Biblical texts: El Niño, which tells the story of the Nativity, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary, the story of the Passion, which The New York Times called "an extraordinary work, containing some of Mr. Adams’s richest, most daring music."
Volume 2 features choral selections from three of Adams’s most celebrated operas: Nixon in China, a dramatic imagining of President Nixon’s epochal 1972 trip to China, Doctor Atomic, which visits physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the days before the testing of the atomic bomb, and A Flowering Tree, an adaptation of a South Indian folktale about a beautiful girl who transforms into a tree. Selections include the hypnotic opening of Nixon in China leading into the chorus “Soldiers of Heaven,” the darkly dramatic "At the Sight of This” from Doctor Atomic, and the brilliant “Flores” from A Flowering Tree.
Volume 3 features all seven choruses from Adams’s second opera The Death of Klinghoffer, a fictionalized account of the infamous Achille Lauro incident of 1985, in which Palestinian terrorists boarded an Italian cruise ship, held its passengers and crew hostage, and killed an elderly Jewish, wheelchair-bound American named Leon Klinghoffer. Influenced by the Bach Passions, the work crosses boundaries between opera and oratorio, with a series of choruses that run through the opera and range from powerful (“Night Chorus”) to ethereal (“Ocean Chorus”) to tender (“Day Chorus”).
