John Corigliano’s music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Honours include a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2, a Grawemeyer Award for Symphony No. 1 (over 300 performances worldwide), an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Score (The Red Violin), and, of his five GRAMMY Awards, three for Best Contemporary Composition (Symphony No. 1, String Quartet, and Mr. Tambourine Man.)
Recent scores include a second opera, The Lord of Cries, with a libretto by Mark Adamo based on The Bacchae of Euripides and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Corigliano’s first opera since The Ghosts of Versailles for The Metropolitan Opera in 1991, The Lord of Cries was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and given its premiere in July 2021. Triathlon, for orchestra and saxophone soloist (who plays three instruments throughout the work) was introduced by Timothy McAllister and the San Francisco Symphony in April 2021. It is Corigliano’s tenth piece for soloist and orchestra, after his concertos for piano, oboe, clarinet, flute (Pied Piper Fantasy), guitar (Troubadours), violin (The Red Violin), and percussion (Conjurer), as well as the orchestral song-cycles Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan for amplified soprano, and One Sweet Morning for mezzo-soprano. Other scores include Symphony No. 3 – Circus Maximus for multiple wind ensembles, as well as a rich folio of chamber works.
The French premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles, in a co-production with the Glimmerglass Festival, was given by the Royal Opera of Versailles in December 2019 and subsequently released on DVD, CD, and Blu-ray. This followed its 2015 staging by Los Angeles Opera, which collected 2017 GRAMMYs for Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Classical album.