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Sellars to direct a new production of Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West.” The Puccini opera features ravishing music, Italian operatic drama, and a sometimes pulpy libretto based on a David Belasco play that raises modern eyebrows when its Native American characters greet each other with “Ugh.” The “Girls” project began when Teatro alla Scala in Milan asked Mr. Sellars have returned to its earliest days - the dark underbelly of part of America’s creation myth. He previously explored its facets in pieces like “The Dharma at Big Sur,” which evokes the Pacific Coast of Jack Kerouac, and “City Noir,” which suggests the seamy Los Angeles of a Philip Marlowe. Adams, a transplant from New England who found his composer’s voice in the Bay Area after making his way west in an unreliable Volkswagen Beetle in 1971. The landscape, and the idea, of California loom large in the work of Mr. Along the way he developed a voice that remains recognizably his own through the constant changes. (He has compared it to Picasso leaving the strictures of Cubism behind.) His palette is constantly evolving - synths here, saxes there, chugging arpeggios, swelling strings, Bachian choruses, echoes of Wagner or Beethoven or jazz or rock. He explored minimalism alongside composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich - weaving shimmering, textured tapestries out of the pulsating repetition of small elements - but later found it confining and tried to incorporate it into a broader language. Early on he turned away from the sometimes chilly modernism of the 20th century - which, at its most extreme, wore its indifference to popular tastes as a badge of pride - and embraced harmony, rhythm, unabashed emotion and flashes of humor. He has had a small rustic cabin here in the Sierras for decades (large swaths of “Girls” are practically set in the neighborhood) and, as he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” the region’s gilded past has sometimes struck him as a troubling metaphor.
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Adams - a thoughtful, wryly funny man who lives in Berkeley, about 200 miles from here, and could easily be mistaken for one of that college town’s professors, or ex-hippies, or both - still worries about what classical music should be, how to get it to speak to audiences that now flock to other art forms, and what his role is in its changing ecosystem. This year, leading orchestras around the world celebrated his 70th birthday over the past decade, three of his operas finally reached the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and earlier this month, the Berlin Philharmonic, which made him its composer in residence last season, released a lavish boxed set of his works.īut for all that, Mr. This onetime enfant terrible has grown into an elder statesman. Adams can fairly stake a claim as America’s most prominent composer. Three decades after the premiere of “Nixon in China,” Mr.
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Adams said, recalling news footage of Trump supporters chanting for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment being shown as he wrote choruses for his opera’s angry mob. “I kept hearing ‘Lock her up!’ at those horrible rallies,” Mr. It was particularly jarring, he said, to write the opera’s climax - in which a Mexican woman is lynched - against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential race. “And when it became not so easy to find gold, they all started sounding like Donald Trump.” “They all came here looking for gold,” he said at one point during a drive through the Sierras along State Route 49, which links many of the old mining sites of the 49ers.