ThomasAdès

In February 2007 Simon Rattle was rehearsing Tevot with the Berlin Philharmonic. The violins needed several attempts at their very high notes. Thomas Adès, who had written them, sat listening; when Rattle called him up to the podium, he could scarcely say anything. He told Tom Service afterwards that he had been overcome by the sound. Rattle shouted in his ear: “You have to say, thank you!” Rattle had commissioned Asyla for Birmingham a decade earlier and took it to his inaugural concert as Berlin’s chief conductor in 2002.

1971–⁠94Training and early works to Arcadiana

Adès was born in London on 1 March 1971. His mother, Dawn, is an art historian; his father, Timothy, a poet and translator. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School, then went to King’s College, Cambridge, from 1989 to 1992, studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He also had chamber-music coaching with György Kurtág, first in Hungary in 1988–⁠89 and again at the International Musicians Seminar in 1993–⁠94. Adès continued to perform as a pianist, playing other composers’ music as well as his own.

In Darknesse Visible (1992), he took John Dowland’s In darkness let me dwell to pieces. Notes from the song become piano tremolos; a line that a singer could sustain moves back and forth between the pianist’s hands. Living Toys (1993) is for fourteen players. A horn plays among gongs and small trumpets in Angels; the bull of Aurochs enters on a bass B. In H.A.L.’s Death, a slowing waltz accompanies the dying computer, and a sopranino recorder represents the astronaut.

The seven movements of Arcadiana (1994) refer to a gondolier in Venice, Mozart’s enchanted kingdom, Schubert’s water song and Watteau’s lovers embarking for Cythera. The central movement, Et… (tango mortale), takes its cue from Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, in which death is present in the pastoral retreat. In it a tango is interrupted by slides and pizzicato. Near the end, O Albion gives the four players a quiet chorale in full chords. One more movement follows, Lethe, named after the river of forgetting.

1995–⁠2001Powder Her Face and Asyla

Powder Her Face reached the Cheltenham Festival in 1995. Philip Hensher’s libretto drew on Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, and the divorce that had made her sex life public property. The opera, with its crowded social world, is written for four singers and fifteen players. The instrumentalists’ equipment includes an accordion, fishing reels and scrap metal; the opening brass music passes straight into the Maid’s laughter. There are tangos and scraps of fashionable popular song, often interrupted by a misplaced accent or an unexpected note. The notorious sexual scene attracted the headlines.

A Hallé residency in 1993–⁠95 led to chamber and orchestral performances. From 1999 to 2008 he directed the Aldeburgh Festival, the institution Britten had founded. His own piano repertory included Couperin and Janáček. In 2001 he played the première of his Piano Quintet with the Arditti Quartet in Melbourne. The piece has a sonata exposition with a repeat, and its players are soon counting different metres.

2004–⁠13The Tempest and after

The Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, written for Anthony Marwood in 2005, places its greatest weight in the middle movement, Paths. The soloist plays chords across all four strings while brass chords descend beneath. Repeated harmonies return in changed scoring as the violin moves from rough multiple stops to a high, sustained line. The two outer movements, Rings and Rounds, are lighter. In the string quartet The Four Quarters (2010), the depiction of a day begins with high violin notes above slower viola and cello. Morning is represented by pizzicato. The last movement depicts a twenty-fifth hour, in dance-like bars of twenty-five semiquavers each.

From 2013Totentanz and The Exterminating Angel

At the 2013 Proms, Simon Keenlyside and Christianne Stotijn sang Totentanz. Keenlyside sang Death; Stotijn sang all the people he summoned. The German text came from the dance-of-death frieze formerly in Lübeck’s Marienkirche, destroyed during the Second World War. Pope, emperor and lesser mortals pass through the score in turn, and the last is an infant. For the infant the orchestra, until then violent, plays a lullaby. The singers repeat tanzen (to dance) while the music descends into the lowest instruments.

“Operas should instead be absurd in a way that is truer than reality,” Adès told Service in the conversations published in 2012. His next opera, The Exterminating Angel, opened at Salzburg in 2016. Tom Cairns wrote the libretto with Adès, based on Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza’s 1962 film. In it, wealthy guests return from the opera, dine and then find that they cannot leave the room. An ondes Martenot is used for the sound of their invisible jailer. Leticia, who is an opera singer herself, has a very high soprano part. One character complains that there are no coffee spoons, and later a woman sings a lullaby to a dead lamb.

Boston appointed Adès its Symphony Orchestra’s artistic partner in 2016. Kirill Gerstein gave the première of his Piano Concerto there on 7 March 2019, with the composer conducting. The concerto is in three movements, fast, slow and fast, and has a formidable solo part. In the finale a three-chord call introduces a fast, tumbling theme. Later the piano introduces another theme, which Adès likened to a ball bouncing downstairs. The complete Dante Project was first given by the Royal Ballet in 2021, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and designed by Tacita Dean. Adès’s score is in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It includes a ferocious piano solo for the suicides in Hell and, on the mountain of Purgatory, recorded voices from Jerusalem’s Great Ades Synagogue.