John Adams

John and Samantha Williams Creative Chair

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker—John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music.

His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. His operas and oratorios such as Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, and El Niño have transformed the genre of contemporary music theater. Spanning five decades, works such as Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, The Dharma at Big Sur, and his Violin Concerto are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music.

As a conductor, Adams has led the world’s major orchestras, programming his own works with a wide variety of repertoire ranging from Beethoven, Mozart, and Debussy to Sibelius, Ives, Carter, Glass, and Ellington. Among his honorary doctorates are those from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, and Cambridge universities and from The Juilliard School. A provocative writer, he is author of the highly acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Since 2009 Adams has been Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father and played in marching bands and community orchestras during his formative years. He began composing at age 10, and his first orchestral pieces were performed while he was still a teenager. After graduating from Harvard University, he relocated to California, where he has lived ever since. In 2019 he was the recipient of Spain’s BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award and Holland’s Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science,” and in 2021 he was appointed Honorary Academician by the General Assembly of the Academicians of Santa Cecilia. He received the 2021 Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University in recognition of his “exceptional commitment to American composers.”

Adams’ conducting engagements in 2025/26 include return visits to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Houston Symphony, with frequent collaborator Víkingur Ólafsson; The Cleveland Orchestra; and New World Symphony. Farther afield, he also returns to the Gothenburg Symphony, Sinfonia Lahti, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in Mexico City, as well as conducting multiple concerts with the Hallé orchestra across a three-day festival of his music.

Recent conducting appearances include The Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera for the American premiere of his most recent opera, Antony and Cleopatra. A five-time Grammy winner, Adams conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the Nonesuch recording of his opera Girls of the Golden West, which received a 2024 Grammy nomination, his 15th, for Best Opera Recording.

In salute of Adams’ 75th birthday in 2022, Nonesuch Records released the 40-disc John Adams Collected Works, a box set of recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label. Also available as a box set is the Berliner Philharmoniker’s John Adams Edition, a CD and DVD collection comprising seven of his works, conducted by Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Kirill Petrenko, Alan Gilbert, and Adams.

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