John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most

unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer

has created over the last forty years. Corigliano's scores, now
numbering over one hundred, have won the Pulitzer Prize, the
Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and
have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent
orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive
listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which
has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and
redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much
from the post-war European avant-garde as from his American
forebears.

Perhaps one of the most important symphonists of his era,

Corigliano has to date written three symphonies, each a landscape
unto itself. Scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a
multitude of wind ensembles, Corigliano's ambitious, extravagant,
and grandly barbarous Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004) was
commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin Wind Ensemble,
who gave its New York premiere in 2005 at Carnegie Hall and
presented it on their 2008 tour in Europe. Circus Maximus has since
been performed by over 60 different ensembles throughout North
and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Naxos released a
stereo recording of Circus Maximus in 2009, and chose the work as
the debut recording in its Blu-Ray format in 2010. Symphony No. 2
(2001), a rethinking and expansion of the surreal and virtuosic
String Quartet (1995), was introduced by the Boston Symphony
Orchestra in 2000 and earned him the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
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 300 orchestras
and recorded three times, this symphony earned him the prestigious
Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Its most recent
engagements were a return to the New York Philharmonic and its
debut by the Hong Kong Philharmonic, both conducted by Jaap van
Zweden.

Corigliano's theatricality, at once thoughtful and innate, has vivified

his ten essays in the concerto form, of which Triathlon, for
saxophonist and orchestra, is his latest. This aptly-named virtuoso
showpiece, in which the soloist plays not one but three instruments
over the course of three widely varied movements, was given its
premiere by soloist Tim McAllister and the San Francisco Symphony
conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero in April 2022. Conjurer (2008), for
percussion and string orchestra, commissioned by an international
consortium of six orchestras for Evelyn Glennie, was introduced by
the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 2007-2008 season, when the
orchestra designated him its Composer of the Year. Conjurer is also
performed frequently by soloist Martin Grubinger. For Joshua Bell,
Corigliano composed Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red
Violin (2005). Developed from the themes of the score to François
Girard's film of the same name, which won Corigliano an Oscar in
1999, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was introduced by the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop and recorded by
them in 2007. Vocalise (2000), a single-movement wordless
concerto for voice, orchestra, and electronics, was commissioned for
the millennium by the New York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur led
Sylvia McNair in the work's premiere; it was later performed and
recorded by Hila Plitmann and the Albany Symphony. Guitarist
Sharon Isbin and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff
introduced Troubadours in 1994. Flutist James Galway and the Los
Angeles Philharmonic under Myung-Whun Chung first
performed Pied Piper Fantasy in 1982. Corigliano's kinetic and
elegant Piano Concerto (1967), in which Victor Alessandro led Hilde
Somer and the San Antonio Symphony, was his first essay in the
genre, but the composer credits his first two concerti for solo winds
with changing both his art and his career. It was during the
composition of the Oboe Concerto (1975: Humbert Lucarelli, oboe;
Kazuyoshi Akiyama, American Composers Orchestra) and,
especially, the Clarinet Concerto (1977) that he first used the
"architectural" method of composing which empowers him to forge
a strikingly wide range of musical materials into arches of
compelling aural logic. The premiere of the Clarinet Concerto, with
Stanley Drucker and the New York Philharmonic under Leonard
Bernstein, was by contemporary accounts the musical event of the
year — a status since confirmed by numerous international
performances and an established place in the contemporary
repertoire.

After thirty years away from the opera stage, Corigliano has
returned to the form with The Lord of Cries, a surreal fantasy
retelling the story of Euripides’ The Bacchae with the characters of
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Santa Fe Opera’s premiere production
featured a cast led by stellar countertenor Anthony Roth Costanza in
the title rôle; conducted by Johannes Debus and directed by James
Darrah, The Lord of Cries made its widely celebrated debut in July
2021. Mark Adamo’s libretto sparked from Corigliano a range of
musical utterances various even for him, from eerie monody
through vehement emotion to orchestral utterances of granitic
solidity and force; Boston Modern Orchestra Project, led by
conductor Gil Rose, reunites the original cast for the piece’s frist
recording in November of 2022.

The Lord of Cries followed The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), the

Mdetropolitan Opera’s first commission in over thirty years. Richly
counterposing the fiction of Mozart and Beaumarchais with the
Reign of Terror to create a richly multilayered meditation on the
need for, and costs of, personal and social change, The Ghosts of
Versailles succeeded brilliantly with both critics and audiences; the
season it opened, Corigliano was elected to the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Musical America named him its
first-ever "Composer of the Year." After triumphs in Chicago,
Houston, and Hannover, Germany, The Ghosts of Versailles returned
to the American stage in a new reduced orchestration in June 2009,
premiered by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, followed shortly by
performances at Ireland's Wexford Festival (2009), the Aspen Music
Festival (2010), Manhattan School of Music (2012), and Wolftrap
Opera (2015). The Metropolitan Opera released a DVD of their
production as part of the James Levine 40th-Anniversary limited
edition series in September 2010. Los Angeles Opera received wide
acclaim for their stunning new production in 2015, conducted by
James Conlon, staged by Tony Award-winning director Darko
Tresnjac and starring Patricia Racette, Christopher Maltman, Lucy
Schaufer, and Patti LuPone. A CD of this production was released by
Pentatone and awarded the Grammy for Best Opera Recording of
the Year. The opera made its French debut in 2019 when Royal of
Opera of Versailles, in collaboration with Glimmerglass Opera,
brough the opera to very theatre in which it was set; that production
was recorded and released on DVD, CD, and Blu-Ray in 2020.

Corigliano's other major vocal works show a comparably lavish and

powerful sense of vocal theatre. 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 re-scored the piece for full orchestra and amplified
soprano in 2004. Its Naxos recording, on which JoAnn Falletta leads
the Buffalo Philharmonic, was released in September 2008 and
garnered Grammy awards for both the work itself and for its leading
interpreter, the soprano Hila Plitmann. Mr. Tambourine Man has also
been arranged for wind ensemble and in a sextet version for the
ensemble eighth blackbird. 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) — with the late Author's Prologue into a
"memory play in the form of an oratorio." Scored for boy soprano,
tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, A Dylan Thomas Trilogy was
recorded in spring 2008 with Leonard Slatkin conducting Sir
Thomas Allen and the Nashville Symphony and Chorus; it was
released by Naxos in November 2008. In 2011, Corigliano unveiled
One Sweet Morning, premiered by the New York Philharmonic with
mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe in September 2011. A co-
commission with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, One Sweet
Morning is a four-movement song cycle on texts by Czeslaw Milosz,
Homer, Li Po, and E. Y. Harburg that reflects on the presence of war,
its anguishes throughout history, and ends with the dream of a
world without it. In 2012 Sasha Cooke performed its Asian premiere
with the Shanghai Symphony conducted by Long Yu. Corigliano's
earliest songs form the cycle The Cloisters (1965), written with
William M. Hoffman, who also wrote the libretto to The Ghosts of
Versailles. His latest songs are a trio of cabaret songs for voice and
piano set to the lyrics of Mark Adamo — End of the Line, Marvelous
Invention, and Dodecaphonia (or, They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose) —
first introduced by William Bolcom and Joan Morris, and known
collectively as Metamusic.

In the chamber realm, Corigliano was, until it disbanded in 2008

(verify), one of the few living composers to have a string quartet
named for him: its young players joined together after an Indiana
University performance of his String Quartet (1995), which
Corigliano wrote as a valedictory commission for the Cleveland
Quartet and which won him that year's Grammy Award for best
contemporary composition. His first chamber score, Sonata for
Violin and Piano (1964), is now a standard of the American
violinist's repertory, having been performed hundreds of times and
recorded dozens since the Spoleto Festival awarded the piece first
prize in its inaugural Chamber Music Competition. His newest
chamber scores are Stomp, for solo violin, commissioned for the
International Tchaikovsky Competition; and Winging It:
Improvisations for Solo Piano introduced by Ursula Oppens in May
2009. His keyboard catalogue includes the virtuoso
showpieces Etude Fantasy (1976) and Fantasia on an
Ostinato (1985) for solo piano, and the unique Chiaroscuro (1997),
for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. Inspired by the version
of Poem on His Birthday for tenor and eight instruments (1970),
Corigliano recast Phantasmagoria (2000) a suite for orchestra
reframing themes from The Ghosts of Versailles into a version for
cello and piano with no loss of force. Contrarily, Corigliano
expandeed Snapshot, ca. 1909, a brief string quartet inspired by a
photo of his father as a young boy, for string orchestra in 2011; and
Stomp, for solo scordatura violin, for Houston Symphony, which
introduced the orchestral version in 2015.

Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School

of Music and retired from the position of Distinguished Professor
Emeritus of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York in
2020. The university has established a scholarship in his name. Born
in 1938 to John Corigliano Sr., a former concertmaster of the New
York Philharmonic, and Rose Buzen, an accomplished pianist and
educator, Corigliano has lived in New York City all his life. Presently
he and his spouse, the composer-librettist Mark Adamo, divide their
time between Manhattan and Kent Cliffs, New York. Corigliano’s
music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer.