The Hallé: John Adams Festival at The Bridgewater Hall and RNCM

A historic moment arrives as John Adams, one of the world’s greatest living composers, returns to the Hallé to conduct his own music at The Bridgewater Hall and the RNCM. Part of The Hallé Presents series, the John Adams Festival gives audiences a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness him directing the works that reshaped what classical music could be. Absorbing minimalist pulse, Romantic drama, avant-garde edge and the raw expression of rock, Adams speaks in a borderless musical language – alive with all of life’s ecstasy, tragedy, humour and fun. From career-defining pieces to a UK premiere, this three-day festival celebrates a composer whose music speaks to everyone.

Adams’s long association with the Hallé includes Slonimsky’s Earbox, co-commissioned for the opening of The Bridgewater Hall in 1996. Built from kaleidoscopic, computer-spun patterns, it captures both his wit and his belief that classical music should stay in dialogue with the modern world. It returns to open the festival on 30 October, alongside soprano Mary Bevan in his orchestration of Debussy’s Baudelaire songs and the This is Prophetic aria from Nixon in China, which dragged opera into the media age. At the heart of the programme is Harmonium, the 1981 choral symphony that marked Adams’s breakthrough. Minimalism suddenly had symphonic scale, expressive depth, and the ecstatic force of massed voices. Performed here by the Hallé Choir, its unfolding landscapes – waves of sound looming, swelling and fading as others rise – capture the essence of the composer’s style.

The following day at the RNCM shows him pulling minimalism off its pedestal and into everyday America. Chamber Symphony is Schoenberg spliced with Saturday-morning cartoons: tightly wound modernism colliding with pop culture. Hallelujah Junction and John’s Book of Alleged Dances push the idea further, making virtuosity a thrill rather than a barrier, and showing Adams as the playful experimenter. That evening, the RNCM Symphony Orchestra sets him in the wider American tradition. My Father Knew Charles Ives channels the marching bands, hymn tunes and New England light of his childhood, blurring autobiography with America’s wider musical landscape. Heard alongside Ives, Jessie Montgomery and Michael Daugherty, Adams becomes part of a living, evolving tradition.

The final concert finds Adams at his most theatrical. He’s joined by violinist Leila Josefowicz, for whom he wrote Scheherazade.2 – a symphony that takes the dramatic scope he admired in the Romantic symphonists and channels it into a story of women’s resilience within a patriarchal society. Then comes The Chairman Dances, a satirical ‘foxtrot for orchestra’ that imagines Mao abandoning politics for a surreal turn on the dance floor. And the festival doesn’t just look back; it hears a living composer at work, with the UK premiere of The Rock You Stand On, a Hallé co-commission that invites Manchester audiences to be among the first in the world to hear Adams’s latest music – conducted by the composer himself.

Taken together, these concerts answer the question: Who is John Adams? Here is a portrait of a composer who pulled classical music out of the ivory tower and reconnected it with lived experience. He is as comfortable with pop-culture humour as with Mahler-scale tragedy, as alert to Motown’s swing as to Reich’s repetitions. And he proves that contemporary music can be witty, moving and instantly communicative without dumbing itself down. Crucially, he’s still doing it now. That’s why this festival matters. It isn’t just a retrospective; it’s an encounter with a living legend whose music continues to shape the sound of our time.