John Adams

• Composer
• Conductor

Reviews

John Adams is feeling festive. The composer is organizing the Los Angeles Philharmonic's first festival for its new music director, Gustavo Dudamel
By DIANE HAITHMAN NOVEMBER 15, 2009
What does a renowned, Harvard-educated, Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music composer say just after the standing-ovation world premiere of his new symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its wildly celebrated new music director, Gustavo Dudamel?
'That was rockin', wasn't it' says a beaming John Adams.
Yeah, that's the way 'we old boomers' talk, Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. President Deborah Borda, 60, jokes of her longtime friend and colleague Adams, 62.
It doesn't seem to surprise her during a conversation at the gala party after the Oct. 8 premiere that Adams would use the phrase when talking about 'City Noir', a work inspired by Hollywood's classic noir films of the 1940s and '50s. Besides -- it was rockin'.
The buzz at the Latin-themed post-premiere affair seemed to have less to do with the generously distributed 'Pasioacute' cocktail created in honor of Dudamel's first Disney Hall concert as Philharmonic music director -- an alarmingly sweet combo of rum, pineapple, coconut juice and grenadine -- than with the afterglow of the music.