Read on to learn more about the British composer Thomas Adès, whose new work Aquifer is being performed at the 2024 BBC Proms. It’s getting its UK premiere with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Simon Rattle, for Prom 61 (Thur 5 Sept).
Who is Thomas Adès?
A British composer, conductor, and pianist, Thomas Adès is one of the most influential, innovative composers working today. His distinctive musical idiom combines bold harmonies, complex textures, and a striking ability to blend adventurous modernism with moving, emotional depth.
Adès’s music can be sophisticated and quite complex to get a handle on. It’s also, though, profoundly original and emotionally engaging.
Where was Thomas Adès born?
Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971 and studied piano, percussion and composition at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He then read Music at King’s College, Cambridge, before embarking on a career as a composer and conductor.
Where was Thomas Adès’s first professional post?
Adès’s first professional post was Composer in Association with the Hallé Orchestra, from 1993 to 1995, during which time he wrote These Premises Are Alarmed for the opening of the Bridgewater Hall in 1996. He wrote Asyla in 1997 for Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle later conducted Asyla in his opening concert as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Adès has received commissions from further afield, notably America: A Prophecy written for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. His compositions have also featured at festivals around the world, including New Horizons Festival in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Festival and the Melbourne Festival.
From 1999 to 2008, Thomas Adès was artistic director of Aldeburgh Festival, the music festival co-founded by Benjamin Britten. He has also conducted a number of orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Orchestre National de France, London Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern.
He has made several recordings as a pianist, including of works by composers Stravinsky and Busoni.
Did you know?
- Adès achieved a double first at King’s College, Cambridge and was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
- He was music director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group from 1998 to 2000.
- He is the only composer to have won the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for large-scale composition three times.
- In 2008, Thomas Adès collaborated with his then-partner, the video artist Tal Rosner, on a piano concerto with moving images, In Seven Days.
Where to start with Thomas Adès? Try these five works
Asyla
Composed in 1997, Asyla is written in four movements and was commissioned by the CBSO and conducted at its premiere by Simon Rattle. The piece includes cowbell and a quarter-tone-flat upright piano.
Tevot
Tevot was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic and its world premiere was conducted by Sir Simon Rattle on 21 February 2007. In Hebrew, Tevot means ‘ark’ but can also mean ‘box’ or ‘vessel’ or alternately, ‘bars’ in a piece of music. Adès told The Guardian ‘I liked the idea that the bars of the music were carrying the notes as a sort of family through the piece’.
Powder Her Face
Written in 1995, Powder Her Face is an opera for four singers and chamber orchestra. The opera is about a beautiful and promiscuous Duchess who is publicly disgraced during her divorce from the Duke of Argyll. Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times said of the work: ‘Since its premiere Powder Her Face has been known as an opera about tabloid culture and the transience of modern celebrity, and it certainly is that. But more clearly than ever it also comes across as a work about class resentment, about the coruscating, deadening effects of money.’
The Tempest
The Tempest, written in 2003, is an opera in three acts based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name which Alex Ross from The New Yorker describes as a ‘masterpiece of airy beauty and power’. Tom Service, in The Guardian, said: ‘The sounds in The Tempest are, I find, some of the most unforgettable and most moving of any recent music.’
Darkness Visible
Written for solo piano in 1992, Darkness Visible that references a John Dowland lute song and causes shimmering textures with a ceaseless tremolo.
Thomas Adès in his own words
In the July 2013 issue of BBC Music Magazine, Thomas Adès talked to our interviewer James Naughtie. Here is some of what he said… ‘Politicians, who are actors really, puzzle me because I don’t think it’s natural for a human mind to be arranged pointing in one direction. You have to pretend if you say that’s the case. Because it is not the way it is. And Wagner is often – enjoyably for me – torn apart by the contradictions.’
‘The music in my mind is a sort of underground river that flows on all the time, and it’s looking for a channel. So in a piece, for example, with an idea, text and character, they are just the channel and I have to let the music dig out, if you like, the piece from the rock’.
‘When I set a text to music, I’ve got the words, and in composing I don’t reach out and grab as many butterflies as I can and hope I find the right one. That’s not the way. Elgar spoke about the air being full of music: you just take as much as you need. That’s close to what I think.’
‘If I listen to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, I find it’s really very much a working out of certain harmonic problems that were posed by Liszt. What I love about Liszt is that he left a lot of things unresolved.’
(Of Britten’s Peter Grimes) ‘I just can’t believe in all these people dressed up as fishermen and that woman singing about her knitting. I mean, who cares?’
Thomas Adès on the music that shaped him
For our April 2024 issue, Thomas Adès spoke to BBC Music Magazine about the music that has shaped his life and career. Here are the six defining pieces of music that he chose.
Schubert Octet
David Oistrakh et al Warner 9029503713
My earliest experience of music was as a manifestation of the physical world: Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet merged with the patterns of light on water reflected on a ceiling. I was kept quiet (ish) on long car journeys by tapes of his songs and of the Octet. I found his songs extended this merging into emotional paradoxes: Lachen und Weinen, happiness and sadness at once.
This feeling of music and life merged into one was my main experience of the world. The mystery of his Octet is still how it can be so tender and intimate, even domestic, and at the same time cosmically vast. I feel that the music is fully aware of this irony.
Chopin Polonaise in A flat
Evgeny Kissin (piano) RCA 09026635352
By about ten, I was obsessed with Chopin, firstly the ‘Polonaise héroïque’ – a space with no floor and no ceiling, all certainties immediately undermined. In such a turbulent universe, anything could happen; he can drift unimaginably far and come crashing back with ferocious force. Another paradox: the widest yearning to roam, with such homesickness.
Walton Façade
Cathy Berberian (mezzo) et al/Steuart Bedford OUP 680 3647
My father says after he showed me my first notes I pushed him off the piano stool. I was also one of those babies who liked the different noises objects made. When my mother needed her saucepans and wooden spoons back, I was given a beautiful snare drum, then hi-hat cymbals, a cowbell, a woodblock: my favourite things.
Growing into adolescence, I loved music with a lot of percussion as I could get involved at home: Varèse, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. My favourite was William Walton’s Façade – I would try to play along with the score to the Cathy Berberian/Robert Tear recording. In Façade too, I’m allured by the paradox: delicious flippancy (1920s cowbell and Edith Sitwell’s quicksilver poetry) dancing over an abyss of damnation and desolation: ‘Why did the cock crow? Why am I lost, Down the endless road to infinity tossed?’
Stravinsky Les noces
Pokrovsky Ensemble Nonesuch 0349712636
Stravinsky’s Les Noces bowled me over, and I’ve stayed bowled over. It was real life: the chaotic wedding, the singers playing different parts, as if a hand-held camera swooped through the party picking up every rank detail. But it was controlled chaos – precise in every rhythm, harmony and tune after tune.
It isn’t concert music – it’s a village knees-up. It is wildly joyful and also painful – it opens with the bride screaming as her hair is pulled for braiding. I love the Pokrovsky Ensemble, whose sound is surely what Stravinsky had in his head from his childhood in Ukraine.
I’ve been lucky to conduct the piece with this group several times – they recorded it with electronic instruments, and I like the blend of that sound with their voices, but it would be lovely to have recorded it with live players.
Messiaen Réveil des oiseaux
Yvonne Loriod (piano) et al; Czech PO/Václav Neumann Supraphon SU41332
Messiaen is a planet – aside from the astonishing colours and dazzling harmony, he created a whole new relation between material, structure and the external world. The power is overwhelming. The first piece I heard was Réveil des oiseaux (1953)– the dawn chorus: just birds.
The opening nightingale singing alone in the dark: I think of that as the darkness and coldness of that period after World War II. He leads you from the claustrophobia of that time into the dawn forest: newness, freedom, pure joy.
Any birdwatcher knows the liberation of listening to wild birds – the release from humanity into timelessness; in this piece it’s common birds like thrushes, robins, woodpeckers, a cuckoo (made of temple-blocks) – but here they’re doors to eternity.
Sibelius Symphony No. 7
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Paavo Berglund Warner 476 9512
I don’t just believe, I know that music transforms our nervous system. Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 proved to me as a teen that in a large-scale structure this transformation could be total. If I was harbouring a dissatisfaction with some real-world inadequacy, I went home and listened to this work and was changed at a molecular level.
The music reached a hand inside me and rinsed my nervous system, restored my strength, set me free from that time and place. I think the greatest gift of art is to free us from time and place.