Work: Bow to String

In an innovative concert experience, John Adams curated a night of living composers to shine the spotlight on his favorite new works, answering the question: “Who’s on John Adams’ playlist?”

“It is impossible to find anyone in the world today who is young and not ill,” muses André Breton in Chiaki Kawamata’s novel Death Sentences. “Youth itself is a kind of disease.” There is in youth something that exerts a powerful hold on the imagination. Its freshness, its arrogance, its promise – all of these building a magnetic aura that exerts a powerful hold on our consciousness.