Opera Choruses

This three-volume collection of John Adams' choruses from his world-renowned operas features choral selections from six iconic stage works with newly arranged piano accompaniments. Adams' stage works are repertory staples at opera houses across the world, celebrated for their exceptional craft, emotional resonance, and urgently relevant subject matter. The Los Angeles Times described the role of Adams' choruses in his operas as a powerful narrative and emotional driver: "They are the weather. They are memories. They are dreams. They are fears. They are history. They are the governors of emotion." 

Volume 1 features choral selections from Adams' two oratorios, based on biblical texts: "El Nino," 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' 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' 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 wheelchair-bound Jewish 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).