Conjurer 8.2.08/The Mannheim Rocket 8.9.08

John Corigliano b. 1938, New York, New York

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 Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2 (2001), a Grawemeyer for his Symphony No. 1 (1991), 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 visible orchestras, soloists and chamber musicians in the world, and recorded on the Sony, RCA, BMG, Telarc, Erato, Ondine, New World, and CRI labels.

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 almost thirty 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 his 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).

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. 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. 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, had its New York premiere in 2005 at Carnegie Hall.

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 and at this writing several new productions are in the works. 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 Violin Sonata and 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, piano and orchestra; 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.


John Corigliano's music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer.

Photo by: J. Henry Fair 2006