John Adams

presidents

Their Majesties the Presidents

17 October 2020 8:51 am

For anyone who’s a little bit worried about the current state of the Union, Andrew Gimson’s book is a godsend.…

Bracing and provocative – but would Wagner have approved? Arcola’s Rheingold reviewed

10 August 2019 9:00 am

When it comes to the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Mark Twain probably put it as well as anyone: ‘Out…

Pat and Richard Nixon in ENO’s 2006 production of John Adams’s Nixon in China

Whatever happened to Alice?

19 August 2017 9:00 am

In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run…

The birth of a royal baby is hardly an exciting event

25 April 2015 9:00 am

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the…

What Cicero knew that David Davis doesn't

14 February 2015 9:00 am

The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard…

Too worthy? Peter Sellars’s staging of John Adams’s ‘Gospel’

ENO’s Gospel According to the Other Mary: great music weighed down by a worthy staging

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…

The erotic Mary, left, by Gregor Erhart (c.1515–20) and the penitent Mary, right, by El Greco (c.1577)

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

22 November 2014 9:00 am

A bogus history book and a new oratorio turn Mary Magdalene into the wife of Jesus and a human rights activist. Damian Thompson feels sorry for the poor woman