Violin Concerto

John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, and lives in Berkeley, California. He composed his Violin Concerto in 1993 on a commission from two orchestras—the Minnesota Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra—and the New York City Ballet. Adams wrote the piece for violinist Jorja Fleezanis, then concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra. Fleezanis played the world premiere in Minneapolis on January 19, 1994, with de Waart conducting. The London Symphony Orchestra, with soloist Gidon Kremer, played the UK premiere on June 26 with Kent Nagano. The New York City Ballet’s performance, “Adams Violin Concerto” choreographed by Peter Martins, was premiered on June 1, 1995; the concerto was performed by soloist Guillermo Figueroa and the New York City Ballet Orchestra led by Gordon Boelzner at New York State Theatre, Manhattan. These are the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of the concerto, though the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra led by conductor Stefan Asbury performed the piece at Tanglewood with soloist Laura Park on August 10, 1995.

The score for Adams’s Violin Concerto calls for solo violin plus an orchestra of 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo and alto flute), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, timpani, 2 percussion (bowed vibraphone, marimba, high cowbell, tubular bells, suspended cymbal, guiro, claves, tambourine, 5 roto toms, 3 bongos, 3 high timbales, 2 congas, 2 low tom toms, 2 bass drums, 2 keyboard samplers, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

For some fifty years, John Adams has been associated with California’s Bay Area, but he was born in Central Massachusetts and grew up in New England (Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire), a geographical and cultural circumstance that has informed many of his works. The dynamic interplay of his traditional training, cultural inquisitiveness, and highly developed aesthetic instincts has resulted in one of the most important bodies of work in American music history, especially in the realm of opera. He is arguably the most accomplished and frequently performed living composer of both opera and symphonic music, and his works exhibit that rare combination of immediate expressive impact with erudite and rigorous craft.

Adams studied clarinet with his father and also worked with Boston Symphony Orchestra clarinetist Felix Viscuglia, eventually performing as a substitute player with the BSO and with Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston. He attended Harvard University, where his composition teachers included Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, David Del Tredici, and Harold Shapero. He was also an accomplished enough conductor with Harvard’s student ensembles and other groups to be offered a fellowship to Tanglewood by Leonard Bernstein, but he turned it down to concentrate on composing. By the time he was awarded his master’s degree from Harvard in 1972, he’d already moved to San Francisco, traveling across the continent in a VW Beetle, as recounted in his memoir Hallelujah Junction. The geographic move underscored his decision to enter a new phase artistically. On his own, he had felt the pull of the new American “maverick” avant garde already for years, having become deeply interested in the philosophy and approach of John Cage and other experimentalists whose work directly challenged the pedantry and prejudice many attributed to establishment composers.

California in the early 1970s was a greenhouse of musical experimentation, inclusion, and free-thinking, with such musicians as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Lou Harrison serving as guiding spirits. Adams, though still searching for his own compositional voice, quickly immersed himself in the progressive musical culture there and became an influencer, as well. He taught at the San Francisco Conservatory and led the school’s New Music Ensemble, and at age 31 became the San Francisco Symphony’s new music advisor. He later served as the ensemble’s composer-in-residence (1982-85).

Adams’s early important works, including Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops, show the strong influence of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, a sensibility that has remained part of his ever-expanding stylistic capacity. His thorough grounding in traditional Western classical music emerges often in his music, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. Such works as Harmonielehre and the Chamber Symphony both reference Arnold Schoenberg (with the Chamber Symphony also, crucially, drawing on the cartoon music of the Looney Tunes/Carl Stalling era); Son of Chamber Symphony and Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra incorporate quotes from Beethoven.

Collaborating with the director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, Adams’s work in opera has won him the greatest renown, undeniably helping reshape the genre itself by using realistic scenarios based on recent historical events. Sellars had approached him in 1983 with the idea that would become his breakthrough opera, Nixon in China, and Adams followed this immense success with Death of Klinghoffer, about the Palestinian Liberation Front’s hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro. His Doctor Atomic creates an operatic mythology centered on Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. His latest stage work is an operatic treatment of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra based on the composer’s own libretto. That opera, his opera Girls of the Golden West, and many others of Adams’s works aim to make direct statements about the world’s big social questions, especially the status of women in history and society. Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls won the Pulitzer Prize, and his Violin Concerto the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Adams is also an accomplished conductor and a generous advocate for the music of his fellow composers.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed many of Adams’s works, beginning with the string orchestra version of Shaker Loops under Seiji Ozawa in 1984; others include Harmonium, Naive and Sentimental Music, the oratorio El Niño, the Doctor Atomic Symphony, Scheherazade.2, and Short Ride in a Fast Machine, performed as part of the BSO's 2025-26 Opening Gala. Later in the season, the BSO and Andris Nelsons perform his “Foxtrot for Orchestra” The Chairman Dances and a new suite from Nixon in China, devised specially for the BSO and featuring soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Thomas Hampson, on a program that will also be given at Carnegie Hall.

Adams’s Violin Concerto, his first real concerto of any kind, seems to have unlocked the genre for him; he has since written many major pieces for soloist with orchestra. His Scheherazade.2 is a hybrid violin concerto; referencing Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 Scheherazade and its major solo part for the concertmaster, Adams’s piece brings the soloist (representing the storyteller of 1001 Nights) entirely into the foreground. His Dharma at Big Sur is a concerto for electric violin and orchestra. Among his several works for piano and orchestra, he has written three true concertos: Century Rolls for pianist Emanuel Ax, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? for Yuja Wang, and most recently After the Fall, composed for Vikingur Ólafsson, who premiered it with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony in January 2025. He’s also written a saxophone concerto and one for string quartet and orchestra, Absolute Jest.

The generic title “Violin Concerto” is a highly unusual one for Adams, whose titles are typically descriptive and poetically evocative, as one can glean from the lists above. Both the title and the work’s three-movement, fast-slow-fast form underline the composer’s view of the piece almost as a platonic representation of the genre—to a point. Adams’s concerto has less in common with the earlier blockbusters of the genre by Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky than with 20th-century predecessors like Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Alban Berg. 

In the first movement, Adams’s concentration on spinning out long, nearly seamless lines, not just in the solo part but also in the orchestral texture, has Prokofiev-like elements but is, more importantly, Adamsian. For all his melodic invention throughout the piece, the constantly impelled pulse of the soloist and orchestra have their origins in the composer’s work of the previous decade; the composer even references his earlier Shaker Loops in his comments on the last movement. In the second movement, “Body through which dream flows,” Adams uses the old variation form of chaconne, a structure based on a repeated harmonic pattern. (A famous chaconne is found in J.S. Bach’s D minor Partita for violin solo, and there’s a similar idea in the third movement of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1.) Adams takes this opportunity to introduce temporary solo partners or counter-colors to the violin in exposed passages for clarinets, flutes, horn, and others. Structured almost like a classical sonata-rondo movement with two contrasting ideas, the third movement, “Toccare,” Italian for “to touch,” evokes the virtuosic, high-energy Baroque form of the toccata.

The composer’s note on the concerto follows.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

John Adams on his Violin Concerto

The proposal to write a violin concerto came from the violinist Jorja Fleezanis, a close friend and enthusiastic champion of new music. Composers who are not string players are seriously challenged when it comes to writing a concerto, and close collaborations are the rule, as it was in this case. For those who have not played a violin or a cello, the physical relation of the turned-over left wrist and grasping fingers defies logic. Intervals that ought to be simple are awkward, while gestures that seem humanly impossible turn out to be rudimentary.

A concerto without a strong melodic statement is hard to imagine. I knew that if I were to compose a violin concerto I would have to solve the issue of melody. I could not possibly have produced such a thing in the 1980s because my compositional language was principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy. Harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music of that decade; melody was almost non-existent. The “News” aria in Nixon in China, for example, is less melody than it is declamation riding over what feels like the chords of a giant ukelele.

But in the early 1990s, during the composition of The Death of Klinghoffer, I began to think more about melody. This was perhaps a result of being partially liberated by a new chromatic richness that was creeping into my sound, but it was more likely due to the need to find a melodic means to set Alice Goodman’s psychologically complex libretto.

As if to compensate for years of neglecting the “singing line,” the Violin Concerto (1993) emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece—an example of “hypermelody.” The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full thirty-five minutes of the piece. I adopted the classic form of the concerto as a kind of Platonic model, even to the point of placing a brief cadenza for the soloist at the traditional locus near the end of the first movement. The concerto opens with a long extended rhapsody for the violin, a free, fantastical “endless melody” over the regularly pulsing staircase of upwardly rising figures in the orchestra. The second movement takes a received form, the chaconne, and gently stretches, compresses, and transfigures its contours and modalities while the violin floats like a disembodied spirit around and about the orchestral tissue. The chaconne’s title, “Body through which the dream flows,” is a phrase from a poem by Robert Haas, words that suggested to me the duality of flesh and spirit that permeates the movement. It is as if the violin is the “dream” that flows through the slow, regular heartbeat of the orchestral “body.”

The “Toccare” utilizes the surging, motoric power of Shaker Loops to create a virtuoso vehicle for the solo violin. After Jorja Fleezanis’s memorable premiere, many violinists have taken on the piece, and each has played it with his or her unique flair and understanding. Among them are Gidon Kremer (who made the first recording with the London Symphony), Vadim Repin, Robert McDuffie, Midori and, perhaps most astonishingly of all, Leila Josefowicz, who made the piece a personal calling card for years.

The Violin Concerto is dedicated to the memory of David Huntley, longtime enthusiast and great champion of my and much other contemporary music.