World Premiere
September 10, 2022

San Francisco Opera opens its 100^th anniversary season with world premiere of John Adams’s newest opera

With a libretto crafted by the composer and based on the Shakespeare drama and stage direction by Elkhanah Pulitzer, Adams continues his operatic creations that began in 1987 with Nixon in China and followed with The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, A Flowering Tree and Girls of the Golden West.

Co-commissioned and co-produced with the Liceu Opera Barcelona, the Teatro Massimo Palermo, and the Metropolitan Opera New York, Antony and Cleopatra was composed specifically for three artists closely associated with John Adams’s music: soprano Julia Bullock, baritone Gerald Finley and tenore Paul Appleby. SF Opera’s music director Eun Sun Kim will conduct.

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The forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works features recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, plus two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. Nonesuch made its first record with John Adams in 1985; he was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. “John Adams coming to the label was one of the central events in our company’s history,” says Robert Hurwitz, Nonesuch’s longtime President and current Chairman Emeritus. “The recordings were done in real time, mostly within a few months of a piece’s first performance. Every recording was either conducted by John, or made under close supervision of the composer, who was in the control booth for every album—when he wasn’t on the podium.” Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels.

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