“John Corigliano is one of America’s most acclaimed composers. He’s won a Pulitzer, an Oscar and five Grammys, and he’s still hard at work, having turned 80 on Feb. 16,” reports Naomi Lewin on Sunday (2/18) at National Public Radio. “His father, violinist John Corigliano Sr., spent 26 years as the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic…. When he wrote Violin Sonata for his father in 1963, John Sr. refused to play it—until it won the Italy’s Festival of Two Worlds in 1964…. ‘My father had to take it out of the closet where he put it,’ Corigliano says. ‘And he loved it. He played it for the rest of his life.’ … [He wrote] the score for the [1980] sci-fi horror film Altered States…. Corigliano’s First Symphony … was the composer’s response to the AIDS epidemic, with an opening movement titled ‘Of Rage and Remembrance.’ … Over the years, Corigliano has … written an opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, inspired by the story behind Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and a song cycle for Bob Dylan’s lyrics called Mr. Tambourine Man. Currently, he’s working on a saxophone concerto and another opera with a libretto by his husband, fellow composer Mark Adamo.”
Posted February 20, 2018
