Thomas Adès


Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest, Violin Concerto, Tevot, In Seven Days, and Polaris.

Biography

Adès was born in London to art historian Dawn Adès and poet Timothy Adès. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. After attending University College School, he achieved a double starred first in 1992 at King's College, Cambridge, studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2004 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex.
He entered a civil partnership, later terminated, with Israeli filmmaker and video artist Tal Rosner in 2006.
In 2007 a retrospective festival of his work was presented at the Barbican Arts Centre in London and he was the focus of Radio France's annual contemporary music festival, "Présences" and Helsinki's "Musica Nova" festival. The Barbican festival, "Traced Overhead: The Musical World of Thomas Adès", included the UK premiere of a new work for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Tevot. Journalist Tom Service wrote of the piece, "Of any piece of new music I've heard at its premiere, this is one of the most immediately, richly powerful." In the spring of 2007, The Tempest returned to the Royal Opera House.
In 2009, he was the focus of Stockholm Concert Hall's annual Composer Festival and was in 2010 appointed foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
On 8 October 2015, Adès was elected into the Board of Directors of the European Academy of Music Theatre.

Compositions

Orchestral

;Asyla
;
;Concentric Paths
;Tevot
;In Seven Days
;Polaris
;Totentanz
;Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

Operas

;Powder Her Face
;The Tempest
;The Exterminating Angel

Choral music

;The Fayrfax Carol

Chamber music

;Five Eliot Landscapes
;Arcadiana
;Cardiac Arrest
;Catch
;Chamber Symphony
;Concerto Conciso
;Court Studies
;Four Quarters
;Les baricades mistérieuses
;Lieux retrouvés
;Life Story
;Living Toys
;The Origin of the Harp
;Piano Quintet

Other musical activities

In 1993, at the age of twenty-two, Adès gave his first public piano recital in London as part of the Park Lane Group series of recitals.
Adès was the first Music Director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group from 1998 to 2000. He served as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1999 to 2008; he was succeeded in 2009 by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
In 2000, he was composer-in-residence of the Ojai Festival in California, under the artistic direction of eminent music impresario Ernest Fleischmann. While there, performances included:
He is also a noted pianist, having been a runner-up in the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition in 1990. EMI has released a CD of Adès as a solo performer called "Thomas Adès: Piano" and several CDs as an accompanist, frequently with Ian Bostridge, Steven Isserlis and others. As a student Adès was a percussionist; he is noted for having played percussion in Stravinsky's "Les noces" under Sir Simon Rattle.
He was resident with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during their 2005/6 and 2006/7 seasons as part of the orchestra's "On Location" series at Walt Disney Concert Hall and other locations. Performances included:
In 2010 Adès was again composer-in-residence, this time of the Melbourne Festival in Australia, under the artistic direction of Brett Sheehy. While there, performances included:
Adès, who frequently performs works by Leoš Janáček, contributed an essay titled "'Nothing but pranks and puns': Janáček's solo piano music" to Paul Wingfield's compilation entitled Janáček Studies, published in 2006 by the Cambridge University Press.
He wrote the music for the 2018 film Colette.

Recordings

DVD
Audio CD
as composer
as performer
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