ThomasAdès CBE
News
- 29 February 2024
Thomas Adès conducts French premiere of The Exterminating Angel at Opéra de Paris
Read full article - 28 September 2023
Thomas Adès in residency with Gewandhausorchester and the Hallé
Read full article - 15 September 2022
Six Askonas Holt conductors begin new orchestral partnerships
Read full article - 21 January 2021
2021 International Classical Music Awards Announced
Read full article - 28 September 2020
New opera film: "Eight Songs From Isolation"
Read full article - 22 September 2020
Gramophone Awards 2020
Read full article - 03 September 2020
Gramophone Awards Shortlist 2020
Read full article - 11 August 2020
2020 BBC Proms
Read full article - 24 March 2020
Play on: keeping the performing arts going during crisis
Read full article - 18 October 2019
Inon Barnatan launches long-term Pentatone collaboration with double Beethoven album
Read full article - 17 July 2013
Adès World première at the BBC Proms
Read full article
Press
Adès, Leith, Tippet / Hallé
Bridgewater Hall, ManchesterApr 2024Adès prefaced Tevot with Elgar’s Sospiri, drawing almost symphonic intensity from what is at first sight just a salon piece, but then demonstrated that his own work has a power that really deserves the word symphonic. Played as magnificently as this, Tevot becomes an immense statement, whichfollows its own irrefutable musical logic while also seeming – for me at least – to conjure up echoes of late Mahler (of the 10th symphony especially); it’s undoubtedly one of Adès’s finest achievements.
- The Guardian
- 07 April 2024
Conducted by Thomas Adès, the Hallé Orchestra threw everything at this concert — and I don’t just mean the huge array of bells, vast and small, assembled for Oliver Leith’s new piece. That came as the climax to a stupendous first half that must have left the players gasping for their interval beverage. And they still had an intense miniature by Elgar (the tiny but tragically hued Sospiri) and Adès’s own 2007 masterpiece Tevot to come. Concerts like this renew one’s faith in the ability of British orchestras not just to survive but to flourish, startle and exhilarate even in these problematic times. Adès’s Tevot also requires a vast orchestra, especially in the jangling percussion department, but it’s a very different piece: a 20-minute epic in which a dark mass of sound seems to journey through storms of high-frequency, high-velocity clouds before reaching a point of ethereal beauty and comparative repose. The title has Hebrew biblical connotations, referencing Noah’s ark and the infant Moses’s basket; hearing it at the present time certainly made one reflect on the need for safe passages through times of turmoil.
- The Times
- 08 April 2024
Adès, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius / London Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, LondonFeb 2023 - Feb 2023If the illustrative music on display wasn’t vivid enough, further attack came from Adès’s exceedingly physical podium manner.
- The Times
- 23 February 2023
Thomas Adès’ "Tempest" Symphony proved a shapely and gorgeous precis of his 2004 opera in a concert conducted by the composer himself. Tchaikovsky’s “Fantasy after Dante” Francesca da Rimini made a rip-roaring end to the concert, the orchestra at full throttle, and Adès steadily ratcheting up the excitement.
- The Guardian
- 23 February 2023
Adès drew characterful playing from the LPO, especially fine in the sparsely-scored Berceuse and Ariel’s Song. Sections like The Feast demonstrate Adès’ vivid orchestrational mastery, harp, piano and glockenspiel tickling the ear as Ariel conjures up a feast for the shipwreck survivors. Tchaikovsky’s "Francesca da Rimini" was given an impulsive, no holds barred reading that saw Adès driving the LPO at full throttle.
- Bachtrack
- 23 February 2023
"The Dante Project" / The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, LondonOct 2021 - Oct 2021It is Adès’s score (which the composer conducts) that really sets the tone. Full of riches, it shimmers, growls and rumbles, glints and slides. In Inferno he’s definitely in the devil-has-the-best-tunes camp, sometimes soaring into Romanticism, sometimes rollicking like a night at the circus. It’s so far from the kind of music McGregor usually choreographs and it forces new invention, making dance to relish, more classical than usual in places, but also more characterful, even comical.
- The Guardian
- 15 October 2021
The real triumph of the evening is Adès’s score, which the composer conducts himself. It’s a sweeping work of fantastic orchestral colours and intense contemporary drama, yet harking back to a romantic age and not afraid to be playful and melodic when called for.
- The Times
- 15 October 2021
"Winterreise" CD
w/ Ian BostridgeAug 2019 - Aug 2019Right from the footstep tread launching the first song, Adès’s piano accompaniment never falters in its imaginative response to imagery and emotional mood, sometimes acting in counterpoint, sometimes allied. Frozen teardrops? A barking dog? The leaves on a tree? We see them in sound. Elsewhere, it’s their sheer detachment that make Adès’s notes so devastating, helping to build the cycle’s mounting atmosphere of desolation — one unresolved by the organ-grinder’s cryptic appearance in the final song.
- The Times
- 16 August 2019
Adès and Gerstein piano duo
Jordan Hall, BostonMar 2019 - Mar 2019Ravel’s “La Valse,” the final piece, was the concert’s high point. The two were at their mind-melded best, bewitching in their rendition of the dreamy, sumptuous waltz and the grotesque currents of darkness that grasped it, conjuring up a danse macabre for a world whirling off its axis.
- The Boston Globe
- 09 March 2019