Composers
John Corigliano
© Christian Steiner
Born: 1938
Brief Biography:
John Corigliano is one of the most significant American composers of his generation. With two Grammy Awards and an Academy Award for his score to The Red Violin, he has enjoyed considerable success as a composer for the concert hall as well as for film. Corigliano's music most often builds his characteristic expressive melody into large-scale structures of compelling logic and transparency. His reputation as a conservative is inaccurate: attentive listening reveals a maverick imagination, an artist who has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and within them found a language all his own, drawn as much from his American forbearers as from the explorations of the post-war European avant-garde. "You must understand the importance of the past," says Corigliano, "but if you don't realize the importance of the present and the future, you don't nourish that - and our art form does not - then it's like a tree that grows no new shoots. Without new shoots the tree dies." For a complete biography, click here.
Key Works:- A Dylan Thomas Trilogy
(1960-76 rev. 1999; soloists, chorus, orchestra) - Clarinet Concerto
(1977; clarinet, orchestra) - Symphony No. 1
(1990; orchestra) - The Ghosts of Versailles
(1991; opera) - Mr. Tambourine Man (2000; soprano, piano; amplified soprano, orchestra)
- Violin Concerto: The Red Violin (2003; violin, orchestra)
- Circus Maximus (Symphony No. 3 for Large Wind Ensemble) (2004; three bands)
| Career Highlights:- 1987-90 Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony
- 1991 The Ghosts of Versailles premiered to celebrate the centenary of the Metropolitan Opera
- 1991 Received Grawemeyer Award for Symphony No. 1
- 1997 Grammy Award for Of Rage and Rememberance and Symphony No. 1 with National Symphony and Leonard Slatkin
- 2000 Academy Award for score to The Red Violin
- 2001 Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Symphony No. 2
- 2008 Conjurer premiered by Evelyn Glennie and performed by nine orchestras in North America and Europe
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Critical Acclaim:
In even the wildest melees of sound and the most turbulent clashes of time signatures and tempos, one sensed a composer who knows exactly what he is doing and how his music will sound.
— New York Times
John Corigliano’s musical language is unique and unmistakable yet rooted in the grand traditions of the past. While his music is often harmonically complex and rhythmically challenging, he also dares to write a simple, beautiful melody, which is unusual in our time. He is a performer’s dream - every note has a place, a direction and a purpose, and his mastery of sound colour in orchestration is unparalleled.
— Joshua Bell, Gramophone
…a mix of ingenuity and classicism, romanticism and precision that I haven't heard on the large orchestra stage in years.
— Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Full Biography:
John Corigliano is one of the finest and most widely recognized American composers. Among the dozens of citations, doctorates, and other honors he has received are included all of the most important music awards — several Grammy's, the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, and an Academy Award for his score to Francois Girard's 1997 film "The Red Violin." One of the few living composers to have a string quartet named after him, Corigliano's work has been performed by some of the most prominent orchestras, soloists and chamber musicians in the world, and recorded on the Sony, RCA, BMG, Telarc, Erato, Ondine, New World, and CRI labels. In 2007, Sony released Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin with Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop. New commercial recordings of Circus Maximus, Mr. Tambourine Man, Three Hallucinations, and A Dylan Thomas Trilogy are forthcoming in 2008.
Corigliano's music most often builds his characteristic expressive melody into large-scale structures of compelling logic and transparency. His reputation as a conservative is inaccurate: attentive listening reveals a maverick imagination, an artist who has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and within them found a language all his own, drawn as much from his American forbearers as from the explorations of the post-war European avant garde. "You must understand the importance of the past," says Corigliano, "but if you don't realize the importance of the present and the future, you don't nourish that — and our art form does not — then it's like a tree that grows no new shoots. Without new shoots the tree dies."
Corigliano was born in 1938 into a distinguished musical family: his father, John Corigliano, Sr., served as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for over twenty years, encompassing the tenures of both Toscanini and Bernstein. The younger Corigliano first came to prominence in 1964 when, at the age of 26, his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1963) was the first and only winner of the chamber-music competition of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Support from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation followed, as did important commissions. For the New York Philharmonic he composed Vocalise (1999), Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1977) and Fantasia on an Ostinato (1986); for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he wrote Poem in October (1970); for the New York State Council on the Arts he composed the Oboe Concerto (1975); for flute phenomenon James Galway he wrote the Pied Piper Fantasy (1982). The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned and introduced his Promenade Overture (1981), as well as the Symphony No. 2 (2001); the National Symphony Orchestra commissioned the evening-length A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (1960, rev. 1999). In the 2007-2008 season, he was the Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony. The symphony gave the premiere of his percussion concerto Conjurer, which was commissioned by six international orchestras for Evelyn Glennie.
Perhaps the most important symphonist of his era, Corigliano has to date written three symphonies, each a wholly separate landscape unto itself. Symphony No. 1 (1991), commissioned by Meet the Composer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was composer-in-residence, channeled Corigliano's personal grief over the loss of friends to the AIDS crisis into music of immense power, color, drama, and scope: performed worldwide by over 150 orchestras and twice recorded, this symphony earned him the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Symphony No. 2 (2001), a rethinking and expansion of the haunted, surreal, and glitteringly virtuosic String Quartet (1995), was introduced by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and earned him the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The third symphony may be his most ambitious and remarkable yet: scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles, Corigliano's excessive, crazed, and grandly barbarous Circus Maximus (2004), commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin Wind Ensemble (who tour the piece in Europe in summer 2008), had its New York premiere in 2005 at Carnegie Hall. It has since been presented by The National Symphony with the US Marine Band, the Aspen Music Festival, the Detroit Symphony, the Dallas Wind Symphony, the Gothenburg Wind Orchestra (Sweden), at Disney Hall in Los Angeles and at various universities around the US.
Corigliano made his operatic debut with The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), a rangy, inventive, and emotional look at the costs of the French Revolution through the eyes of Beaumarchais, author of the famed Figaro trilogy. The Metropolitan Opera's first commission in three decades, Ghosts succeeded brilliantly with both critics and audiences; both its original engagement and its 1994 revival boasted completely sold-out runs, and that season Corigliano was both elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and named Musical America's first-ever "Composer of the Year." The Chicago Lyric Opera performed the work in their 1995 season, Hannover Opera gave the German premiere in 1999. University productions have taken place at University of Houston and Indiana University. A new version with a reduced orchestration will debut in 2009. Ghosts remains Corigliano's only work expressly for the opera stage but his other large-scale vocal works show a comparably lavish and powerful sense of vocal theatre. A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (1960, rev. 1999) revisits and combines three of Corigliano's earlier settings of this poet — Fern Hill (1960), Poem in October (1970), and Poem on His Birthday (1976) — into a "memory play in the form of an oratorio," scored for boy soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra. Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) boldly refashions texts by the iconic songwriter into a compelling monodrama, by turns savage, yearning, and hallucinatory; begun as a song cycle for piano and soprano in 2000, Corigliano rescored the piece for full orchestra and amplified soprano in 2004.
Equally active as a creator of chamber music, Corigliano's catalogue includes (besides the Violin Sonata and the String Quartet) the virtuoso showpieces Etude Fantasy (1976) and Fantasia on an Ostinato (1985) for solo piano; Phantasmagoria (2000), a suite of themes from The Ghosts of Versailles, for cello and piano; Fancy on a Bach Air (1996) for solo cello (recorded on Sony by Yo-Yo Ma); and the unique Chiaroscuro (1997), for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. Of late, he has ventured into the cabaret, setting Mark Adamo's lyrics, Marvelous Invention (2001) and Dodecaphonia (or, They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose) (1997) for William Bolcom and Joan Morris.
Corigliano serves on the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music, and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which recently established a composition scholarship in his name. He lives in New York City and in Kent Cliffs, New York.
His music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer.
— August 2008
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