Composers
Mark Adamo
© Martin Gram
Born: 1962
Acclaimed by critic Alex Ross as “one of the best opera composers of the moment,” composer-librettist Mark Adamo has lately ventured into symphonic composition, choral work, and stage direction with striking assurance. Adamo first attracted national attention with the libretto and score to his uniquely successful début opera, Little Women, after the novel by Louisa May Alcott. Introduced by Houston Grand Opera in 1998 and revived there in 2000, Little Women has since enjoyed over fifty-five national and international engagements in cities ranging from New York to Minneapolis, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Adelaide, Mexico City, and Tokyo, where it served as the official U. S. cultural entrant to the 2005 World Expo. Telecast by PBS/WNET on Great Performances in 2001 and released on CD by Ondine that same year, Little Women was acclaimed as one of Amazon.com’s Ten Best Opera Releases of 2001, and further praised as a “masterpiece” by the New York Times in its East Coast debut by New York City Opera in March 2003: it received its Australian premiere at the State Opera of South Australia in May 2007, and new productions have been announced this spring in Wilmington and Orlando.
Comparable acclaim greeted the premiere of Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess, adapted from Aristophanes’ comedy but including elements from Sophocles’ Antigone. Lysistrata was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera for its 50th anniversary and introduced in March 2005, when it was described in The New Yorker as “a sumptuous love story, poised between comedy and heartbreak” by “a brilliant theatre composer of effortless mastery.” Lysistrata made its New York City Opera début in March 2006, when it was praised by the New York Times for its “ambition, sweep, and skill” and “haunting music:” New York Magazine, deeming it as “a serious, ambitious, and creatively generous piece of work,” noted that “Adamo’s Little Women, only eight years old, is already looking like a repertory piece. With luck, Lysistrata might well do the same.” The Seagle Colony unveiled a new production of the piece in August 2007.
The 2006-2007 season brought a mini-festival of Adamo’s music to Washington, D.C.: the capital premiere of Little Women, premieres of the revised versions of three orchestral pieces, and, at the Kennedy Center, Adamo’s first concerto. Four Angels: Concerto for Harp and Orchestra was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and introduced in June 2007, when The Washington Post described it as “ambitious, eloquent, and radiantly beautiful: one of the best new pieces Music Director Leonard Slatkin has championed.” In May 2007, Washington’s Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, for which he served as first composer-in residence, performed the revised version of Adamo’s Late Victorians which The Washington Post called “a captivating chamber opera:” that autumn, the same orchestra introduced Alcott Music, from Little Women, for strings, harp, celesta, and percussion; Regina Coeli, an arrangement of the slow movement of Four Angels for harp and strings alone; and the four-minute Overture to Lysistrata for medium orchestra.
Composer-in-residence at New York City Opera from 2001 through 2006, where he led the VOX: Showcasing American Composers program, Mark Adamo also served as Master Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts in May 2003, when he coached teams of composers and librettists in developing their work for the stage. He has directed two new productions of Little Women for Cleveland (summer 2004) and Milwaukee (fall 2005,) both of which were cited among the year’s best classical events by the critics of their respective newspapers: and he has given dozens of master-classes and coachings nationwide, most recently at NYU’s Skirball Center under the auspices of American Lyric Theatre.
Mark Adamo began his education in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where, as a freshman in the Dramatic Writing Program, he received the Paulette Goddard Remarque Scholarship for outstanding undergraduate achievement in playwriting. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Music Degree cum laude in composition in 1990 from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he was awarded the Theodore Presser prize for outstanding undergraduate achievement in composition. He has annotated programs for Stagebill, the Freer Gallery of Art, and most recently for SONY/BMG Classics; and his monograph on the music of John Corigliano was published by the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester for its Corigliano residency in March 2000. Other criticism, scholarship, and interviews have been published by Andante.com, The Washington Post, Stagebill, Opera News, the Star-Ledger, and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
His music is published by G. Schirmer.
— January 2008
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