ADORATION | MARTIN CID MAGAZINE - FEATURE

Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration Makes GRAMMY History with Best Opera Nomination

by: Alice Lange | November, 2025

The electroacoustic opera from the Pulitzer-finalist composer, praised for its potent sonic landscape, tackles the timely collision of media distortion, racism, and grief.

The world premiere recording of composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s electroacoustic chamber opera, Adoration, has been nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording. This honor is a significant historic milestone, marking the first time in history that an opera by an Armenian composer has been nominated in the category. The nomination is a major validation for the work and for Kouyoumdjian, who herself was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Adoration is an adaptation of the 2008 film of the same name by acclaimed Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. With a taut, “exemplary” libretto by Royce Vavrek, the opera confronts the volatile intersection of grief, racism, and media distortion in the digital age. The narrative centers on Simon, an orphaned high school student, who is encouraged by a teacher to appropriate details from a historical terrorist attack as part of a dramatic writing exercise, claiming the perpetrators were his parents. When this fabricated story goes viral, the opera charts the ensuing hysteria and suspicion, using the community’s reaction to highlight the deep-seated challenges of intolerance. The work’s dramatic architecture powerfully juxtaposes this fictional online narrative against a private, real story of family strife and rejection, until a final, shocking revelation forces them together.