Performance Year: 2025, 2027
American composer John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work of any composer over the last forty years. Corigliano’s scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, five GRAMMY Awards, an Academy Award, and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like “symphony” or “concerto” and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European avant-garde as from his American forebearers.
Corigliano’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2, the Grawemeyer Award for Symphony No. 1 (which has received over 300 performances worldwide), the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Red Violin, and, of his five Grammy Awards, three for Best Contemporary Composition for Symphony No. 1, String Quartet, and Mr. Tambourine Man. In 2017, the 2015 Los Angeles Opera staging of The Ghosts of Versailles won the GRAMMYs for Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Classical album.
Recent scores include a second opera, The Lord of Cries, with a libretto by Mark Adamo based on The Bacchae of Euripides and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Corigliano’s first opera since The Ghosts of Versailles for The Metropolitan Opera in 1991, The Lord of Cries was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and given its premiere in July 2021. Triathlon, for orchestra and saxophone soloist (who plays three instruments throughout the work) was introduced by Tim McAllister and the San Francisco Symphony in April 2021. It is Corigliano’s tenth piece for soloist and orchestra, after his concerti for piano, oboe, clarinet, flute, guitar, violin, and percussion as well as the orchestral song-cycles Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan for amplified soprano and One Sweet Morning for mezzo-soprano. Other scores include Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus for multiple wind ensembles as well a rich folio of chamber works.
