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John Adams: Girls Of The Golden West on CD

Girls of the Golden West is a California opera, telling the story of the Gold Rush not through familiar time-worn myth, but in the words and deeds of real people: in the words of Mark Twain, "the strangest population, the finest population... who ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. "Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars drew from original sources from the Gold Rush era-letters, journals, newspaper articles, and familiar song lyrics-to create the libretto. The composer leads the LA Phil in this recording made in Disney Hall. The aria "Wagon Ride," which features Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock (both also Nonesuch artists), is available today. The Los Angeles Times called the opera "glorious and compelling. " After it's San Francisco premiere in 2017 and a production at the Netherlands Opera, Adams revised the opera significantly. Writing about this new, dramatically more compact, version, Mark Swed wrote in the Times, "The Disney concert performance... went straight for the gut. "Girls of the Golden Westfeatures the Los Angeles Master Chorale, long familiar with Adams' choral music, prepared by it's Artistic Director Grant Gershon, and a cast that also includes Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Daniela Mack, and Ryan McKinny. Adams says, "Girls of the Golden Westmay be my most personal of all my stage creations. Like the characters in it's story, I too am a kind of California immigrant... For forty years I have hiked those same mountains... And I share the same sense of awe and appreciation that Dame Shirley so perfectly evokes in the opera's very last moment-for the fathomless splendor and 'never-enough-to-be-talked-about sky of California.