Thomas Adès

Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971, into an artistic family with Syrian Jewish roots. He gave his first public piano recital in the Purcell Room at London’s South Bank Centre in 1993, launching a triple international career as a composer, pianist and conductor. His music was already remarkable for its spectacular variety of techniques and styles, ranging from the sumptuous solo pianism of Traced Overhead to a bleak Tennessee Williams song setting, Life Story. This range of qualities came together in Adès’ first major success, his opera Powder Her Face (1995), a portrait of the disintegrating lifestyle of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, after her 1963 divorce. High-profile orchestral commissions followed, including America: A Prophecy for the New York Philharmonic in 1999. Then came the virtuoso fantasy of The Tempest, based on Shakespeare’s play and performed at London’s Royal Opera House in 2004, with Adès himself conducting. He has continued to be a prolific creative force on multiple fronts. In 2016 came The Exterminating Angel, an operatic re-working of Luis Buñuel’s film, conducted by Adès at the Salzburg Festival. In 2018 he wrote the score for the film Colette, starring Keira Knightley. Adès’s major project of recent years has been Dante, a ballet score in three parts, “Inferno”, “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”, based on the Italian poet’s Divine Comedy.