John Corigliano
Composer
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Corigliano was born in New York City to a deeply musical family – his father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. After studying composition at Columbia University he worked as a classical music radio producer and taught at the Manhattan School of Music, where in the late 1970s he composed his Oboe and Clarinet Concertos, and film scores for Altered States (1980) and Revolution (1985). In 1987 he was appointed as the first ever composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for which he composed the first of his three (to date) symphonies.
Conceived as a memorial to friends who had died in the AIDS epidemic, the First Symphony made an immediate impact and won the Grawemeyer Prize in 1991. Corigliano's "grand opera buffa" The Ghosts of Versailles opened at New York's Metropolitan Opera in December that same year and attracted considerable acclaim. But neither work surpassed the worldwide reach and impact of his Academy Award-winning film score for The Red Violin (1997), subsequently adapted (in 2003) into a full-scale concerto, and followed in 2007 by the percussion concerto Conjurer for Evelyn Glennie. A potent and highly communicative presence in the American and international concert hall, Corigliano also teaches composition at the Juilliard School, where his students have included Eric Whitacre, Elliot Goldenthal and Nico Muhly.
