Recommended Sheet Music, John Adams: Opera Choruses

Available for the first-time, Boosey & Hawkes have published a three-volume collection of John Adams's choruses from his world renowned operas, featuring choral selections from six of his iconic stage works: El Niño, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, A Flowering Tree, and The Death of Klinghoffer.

These volumes feature newly arranged piano accompaniments by pianist and transcriber Chitose Okashiro, and are edited by the conductor of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon. Gershon has closely collaborated with John Adams for many decades, and has conducted multiple premiers of the composers' stage works. The new piano versions of the orchestral accompaniment featured in these volumes have been meticulously crafted to reflect Adams's highly virtuosic piano writing, as well as the rich and complex orchestrations of his large-scale works.

Volume one features choral selections from Adams's two oratorios, both based on Biblical texts. El Niño tells the story of the Nativity, with the first half focusing on Mary's thoughts before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, and the second half covering the events after the birth, Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the early life of Jesus. The second oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary depicts the story of the Passion, and rather than focusing on Jesus or his mother, instead focuses on Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha.

Volume two features choral selections from three of Adams's most celebrated Operas. Adam's first opera, Nixon in China, is a dramatic imagining of President Nixon's 1972 trip to China. The opera Doctor Atomic visits physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and depicts the events leading up to the testing of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945. The third opera featured in the second volume, A Flowering Tree, is an adaption of the South Indian folktale about a beautiful young girl who transforms into a tree.

Volume three features all seven choruses from Adams's second opera The Death of Klinghoffer, a fictionalised account of the infamous Achille Lauro incident of 1985, where Palestinian terrorists boarded an Italian cruise ship, held both passengers and the crew hostage, and killed an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jewish American called Leon Klinghoffer.

John Adams's stage works are repertory staples at Opera Houses across the world, and are celebrated for their exceptional craft, emotional resonance, and urgently relevant subject matter. You can browse more of John Adams's sheet music publications here.