The tenth episode of Composing Myself sees Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham once again stretch their hands across the ocean to New York to embark on a wonderful journey of memories, anecdotes and musings with veteran composer John Corigliano. The conversation covers John’s formative years growing up in a musical family and how the lingering nerves he reserved for his father affected his professional journey (“for the first ten or fifteen years of buy compositional life I never sat in the hall for a performance”); the impact of the early Disney oeuvre (Bambi, Dumbo etc) on his creative spark; winning Grammys, Oscars and a Pulitzer Prize - and the award he’s most proud of; the harrowing story behind Symphony No. 1; how a personal black spot with the catalogue of Bob Dylan led to a Grammy-winning setting of Dylan's poetry; and the painstaking creation of The Ghosts of Versailles. Not to be missed!

http://www.johncorigliano.com/

John Corigliano's music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Symphony No. 2, the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No. 1 (given over 300 performances worldwide), the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Score (The Red Violin), and, of his five Grammy Awards, three for Best Contemporary Composition (Symphony No. 1, String Quartet, and Mr. Tambourine Man.)

Recent scores include a second opera, The Lord of Cries, with a libretto by Mark Adamo based on The Bacchae of Euripides and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Corigliano's first opera since The Ghosts of Versailles for The Metropolitan Opera in 1991, The Lord of Cries is commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera for premiere in 2021. A new Saxophone Concerto for the San Francisco Symphony's 2020-2021 season will be Corigliano's tenth piece for soloist and orchestra, after his concerti for piano, oboe, clarinet, flute (Pied Piper Fantasy), guitar (Troubadours), violin (The Red Violin), and percussion (Conjurer), as well as the orchestral song-cycles Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan for amplified soprano, and One Sweet Morning for mezzo-soprano. Other scores include Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus for multiple wind ensembles, as well a rich folio of chamber works.

The French premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles, in a co-production with Glimmerglass Festival, is scheduled by the Royal Opera of Versailles for December of 2019; this follows its 2015 staging by Los Angeles Opera, which collected 2017 Grammys for Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Classical album. In spring of 2019, Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 travelled to Hong Kong and returned to the New York Philharmonic, both engagements conducted by Jaap van Zweden.

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