Girls of the Golden West is John Adams’s eighth music theatre work to be released by Nonesuch Records. Adams’s stage works are among the most performed contemporary operas of our time and include Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, and Doctor Atomic.  
 
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 now.
 
The Los Angeles Times called the opera “glorious and compelling”. After its 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 West features the Los Angeles Master Chorale, long familiar with Adams’s choral music, prepared by its 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 West may be my most personal of all my stage creations. Like the characters in its 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.’”
 
In the recording’s liner note, Jake Wilder-Smith adds, “Adams’ score [highlights] the profane humor and mawkish sentimentality of the Gold Rush songs that he incorporates throughout the opera, which rise to almost sublime heights in his high-octane and inventive settings of the songs. During the Gold Rush, these lyrics were sung to the tune of recycled melodies from Stephen Foster standbys like ‘Camptown Races’ or ‘Oh! Susanna.’ Now, set anew to music that is pure, unadulterated Adams, they release a static charge long dormant within them; the resulting sparks and flares contribute to the opera’s electric energy.”
 
“I set these raunchy and vivid song lyrics to my own music. Sung by the male chorus, they provide much of the gusto in the opera,” Adams says. “There are resonances with earlier works of mine like Nixon in China and Grand Pianola Music, but by now I also detect traces of the Brecht-Weill mix of theater, popular song, and opera. This is a dream cast, and no orchestra in the world knows my music better than the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”