What the press say...

The Guardian
Mozart inspired John Adams to compose. His new opera takes The Magic Flute and its themes of magic and transformation as a starting point Mozart was the first composer in my life. I grew up in a very rural part of New England, and when I was about nine years old our schoolteacher read the class a child's biography of Mozart.
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Financial Times
An impoverished Indian girl transforms herself into a tree so that she can sell her blossoms at the prince's palace. The prince falls in love with her and they marry, but a jealous sister strips the tree of its branches, consigning the girl to the netherworld. The prince tries to find his beloved by becoming a beggar. Eventually he recognises her voice, she returns to human form and they are united. Fanciful? Naive? No more so than The Magic Flute, another love story about transformation, trial by fire and the redemptive power of music. Read more

Daily Telegraph
The première of John Adams's new two-act opera, The Flowering Tree, is the centrepiece of New Crowned Hope, Vienna's current Mozart-based arts festival, curated by maverick opera director Peter Sellars. The opera is loosely inspired by The Magic Flute, with a libretto written by Adams with help from Sellars. Read more

Cinema Scope
If you live in Austria, by this midpoint in the year of Mozart’s 250th anniversary, nobody can fault you if you’ve had enough. Wolfgang, wellspring of national popularity (cue tourism-tie-ins) and Amadeus, artist of the first order and whatnot, have been so omnipresent as to become indistinguishable, increasingly resembling a brand rather than a brilliant light (and mind) in artistic history. Read more

New York Times
The problem lies in the title: 'La Passion de Simone'. In a work described as “a musical journey in 15 stations,” Kaija Saariaho, the Finnish composer, and Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-born writer who also provided the librettos for Ms. Saariaho’s other two operas, follow a traditional religious model in a homage to someone they compare to Jesus. Read more

Los Angeles Times
Seven films featured as part of last year's New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth will be shown next week as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival. The six features and a short were commissioned by Peter Sellars, the Vienna festival's artistic director, who sought international filmmakers who would deal in highly personal ways with such Mozartian themes as transformation, forgiveness and recognition of the dead. Read more

'A Flowering Tree is a major, wonderful work, one which — significantly — leaves the listener wishing to hear it again, and wanting more like it.' The Examiner

'A Flowering Tree' comes to us from the distant past, but Adams has turned it into music for the ages.' Opera Review