Thomas Adès is one of today’s leading composers. His eclectic, prolific and heterodox music represents a journey through sound, using transposed structures, polarities that attract and repel each other, points of view that are both nearby and distant.
On 5 and 6 November, he will conduct the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra performing some of his works, including the national premiere of Märchentänze, a concerto for violin and orchestra, commissioned jointly by L’Auditori, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Göteborgs Symfoniker, with Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto as soloist. He will also conduct an orchestral suite based on his chamber opera Powder Her Face, whose plot is based on the scandalous divorce of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. The programme will round off with the first of the Mephisto Waltzes by Franz Liszt, Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke (The Dance in the Village Inn) and the ballet suite Les biches by Francis Poulenc.
On 9 November, Adès will be taking part in L’Auditori’s Chamber Music Season accompanied by tenor Ian Bostridge. They will be performing Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, Winterreise (Winter Journey). This is his most complex, enigmatic and sombre cycle of lieder. Written at the end of his short, intense life, it consists of 24 songs based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, which go far beyond a lament for lost love and transport us to a much deeper and more transcendent dimension. Ian Bostridge is one of today’s best known performers and with him we can discover one of Thomas Adès’s lesser known facets, that of pianist.
About Thomas Adès
He was born in London in 1971. He is a prestigious composer and musician, often working with world famous orchestras and opera companies and appearing at leading festivals.
His works for orchestra include Asyla (1977), Tevot (2007), Polaris (2011), his violin concerto Concentric Paths (2005), a piano concerto with video installation In Seven Days (2008), Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra (2013) and his concerto for piano and orchestra (2019), first performed by leading orchestras and at some of the world’s most important festivals. His has also written many pieces of chamber music and compositions for solo performers.
Adès has been an artistic partner with the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2016 and conducts performances in Boston and Tanglewood. He performs chamber music with the orchestra’s musicians and directs the Contemporary Music Festival held in summer. He also teaches piano and chamber music at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
He regularly conducts the Los Angeles, San Francisco and London Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston, London, BBC, Finnish Radio and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Orchestra di Santa Cecilia. Adès has conducted the Radio France and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. In the 2021-2022 season he conducted the world premiere of his ballet The Dante Project at the Royal Opera House in London, with choreography by Wayne McGregor.
He has received numerous accolades, including the Grawemeyer Award for Asyla (1999); the Royal Philharmonic Society Large-Scale Composition Award for Asyla, The Tempest and Tevot; the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for Arcadiana, and the British Composer Award for The Four Quarters. In 2015 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize and in January 2021 he was a member of the jury for the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award.
News
Aleix Palau | 2 November 2021
Thomas Adès conducts the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise with Ian Bostridge at L'Auditori
Composer, conductor and pianist Thomas Adès will be spending a week at L’Auditori, directing a programme with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and conducting a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise, accompanied by tenor Ian Bostridge. With these two commitments, Adès will be completing the work he began last year.
