Venue of concert: Grand Opera, Houston web site 

Composer: Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921)
Librettist: Ferdinand Lemaire 

Soloists: Denyce Graves, mezzo-soprano, Delilah; Sergei Larin, tenor, Samson; Greer Grimsley, baritone, High Priest

Ensemble: Houston Grand Opera Chorus Director: Richard Bado

Orchestra: Houston Grand Opera Orchestra Conductor: Philippe Jordan

Monday 25 November 2002 at 20.05 CET: 

Country Band March. Shaker Loops. Fearful Symmetries.Rhapsody in Blue 

The concert will be relayed by 27 EBU Members: RTBF, Belgium; ER, Estonia; RSR, Switzerland; HRT, Croatia; ROR, Romania; RDP, Portugal; ORF, Austria; NRK, Norway; HR, Frankfurt; DR, Denmark; RTSI, Switzerland; RNE, Spain; SR, Sweden; LRT, Lithuania; BNR, Bulgaria; DLR, Germany; SR, Germany; PR, Poland; LR, Latvia; RTVSLO, Slovenia; YLE, Finland; RTE, Ireland; BBC, Great Britain; YRT, Yugoslavia; MR, Hungary; NPR, USA; and ERT, Greece. 

Venue of concert: Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, web site

Country Band March .Composer: Charles Ives Shaker Loops. Fearful Symmetries. 
Composer: John Adams 
Rhapsody in Blue: Composer, George Gershwin 
Soloist: Jeffrey Kahane, piano

Performers for the entire concert: Orchestra: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (http://www.laco.org/) Conductor: John Adams

John Adams  American composer and conductor. Known particularly for his operatic works on contemporary subjects, John Adams is considered one of the most frequently performed living composers of concert music. He studied the clarinet with his father and with Felix Viscuglia, clarinettist with the Boston SO. At the age of 10 he began theory and composition lessons, and at 14 he had his first piece performed by the community orchestra with whom he practised conducting. He also performed with the orchestra alongside his father, often appearing before an audience of mentally-handicapped patients at the New Hampshire State Hospital. As a student at Harvard University (1965-71, MA 1972) he studied composition with Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Roger Sessions, Harold Shapero and David Del Tredici. During this period he performed occasionally as a clarinettist with the Boston SO. After moving to San Francisco in 1971 Adams taught at the San Francisco Conservatory (1972-82). He quickly became involved in the Bay Area's thriving new music scene and began to forge associations with local composers and musicians. As the conductor of the Conservatory's New Music Ensemble, he commissioned and introduced new works by important experimental composers. In 1978 he became new music advisor to the San Francisco SO. With music director Edo de Waart, he created the Symphony's New and Unusual Music series, introducing major American and European avant-garde composers to San Francisco audiences. His collaboration with the orchestra served as the model for the Meet the Composer residency programme, through which he was appointed the Symphony's composer-in-residence (1982-5). Harmonium and Harmonielehre, both composed for the orchestra, established his reputation on a national scale. In 1983 the director Peter Sellars approached Adams about writing an opera on the improbable subject of Richard Nixon's momentous six-day visit to China to meet Mao Zedong in 1972. Given its première by the Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, Nixon in China was performed over 70 times in the following few years. The opera was televised by PBS and received both an Emmy and a Grammy award. The Nonesuch recording was named 'one of the ten most important recordings of the decade' by Time magazine. Between 1989 and 1991 Adams and Alice Goodman created a second opera on a contemporary event, the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro by a small group of Palestinian terrorists. The Death of Klinghoffer received its first performance in Brussels in March 1991 during the Gulf War. The original production, directed by Sellars with choreography by the Mark Morris Company, was also staged in Lyons, Vienna, Brooklyn and San Francisco. The political sensitivity of the subject, however, remained an issue of debate and misunderstanding throughout the run of performances. Although the opera is carefully balanced, with eloquent and profane language given equally to Jews, Palestinians and the Christian hostages, the San Francisco performances were picketed and the work was not staged in the USA after 1992.  Adams' third stage work, I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, an 'earthquake/romance' also staged by Sellars, opened in May 1995 in Berkeley, California. The original production completed a five-month tour to Montreal, New York, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris and Hamburg. As a conductor, Adams has also maintained an active schedule. In 1988 he was named creative chair of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, for which he served as conductor and music advisor until 1990. He has served as artistic director and conductor of the Ojai and Cabrillo Music Festivals in California, and has appeared with the LSO, the London Sinfonietta, the Halle Orchestra, the Oslo PO, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and the Deutsches-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has often programmed his own works alongside those by composers as diverse as Zappa, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Ives, Copland, Reich and Glass. In 1997 he celebrated his 50th birthday with a concert in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw featuring his own music and works for big band by Gil Evans, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. The same year, Emanuel Ax gave the première of Century Rolls (1996) with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1999 Adams toured Europe with the Ensemble Modern, conducting his Naive and Sentimental Music (1997-8) and Ives's Fourth Symphony.

Contact 
Pierre-Yves Tribolet
EBU 
Head of Euroradio/Classics
Tel: +41 (0)22 717 2611 or +41 (0)79 202 5825
tribolet@ebu.ch