Leila Josefowicz reflects on her long relationship with Thomas Adès’s violin concerto, now out in her live recording with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård. My interview for The Strad:
Leila Josefowicz has made contemporary music central to her career, performing new scores with the same conviction others reserve for the classics. Over the past two decades, she has built lasting partnerships with composers who expand the violin’s expressive language, and has inspired concertos from composers ranging from John Adams and Esa-Pekka Salonen to Luca Francesconi…
Here’s the essay I wrote for the Cleveland Orchestra’s program this week featuring guest conductor and composer Thomas Adès:
Among the preeminent composers of our era, Thomas Adès has likened the practice of creating art — whether music, literature, or painting — to fashioning “a simulacrum of the real world, a reflection”…
The Danish String Quartet’s multi-year “Doppelgänger” Project has paired newly commissioned works by four leading contemporary composers with chamber music masterpieces by Franz Schubert (three of them quartets, the last one being Schubert’s String Quintet in C major). The project has now concluded with the premiere of Thomas Adès’s new string quintet Wreath.
Wreath — for Franz Schubert is the latest creation from one of the world’s most-sought-after composers. “I am most grateful to the great Danish String Quartet for giving me the time and encouragement to realize and develop this new path in my work,” Adès writes in the freshly completed score.
My program notes for the Cal Performances performance in April 2024 can be found here.
The British-born, Berlin-residing Rebecca Saunders is this summer’s composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival. Tonight brings the culminating event of her residency: the world premiere of her piano concerto to an utterance. She wrote it while working closely with the soloist Nicholas Hodges, in her signature fashion, to explore aspects of the instrument’s sound potential.
The premiere was originally to have taken place last summer and had to be postponed because of the pandemic. In another twist, Ivan Volkov, who was originally scheduled to conduct, had to bow out just last week for reasons of health. Composer-conductor Enno Poppe will lead the newly named Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. They will then take the work to Musicfest Berlin.
“The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice,” explains Saunders. “It seeks to tell its own story, wavering, almost painfully, inevitably failing to sustain its uncertain striving. It seeks to attain the silence of its end through its own excessive speaking: an incessant, compulsive soliloquy on the precipice of non-being.”
The clip above is from a piece titled “Study,” based on the solo part, that Saunders presented last year at the Musikfest Berlin.
toan utterance is the tenth in the series of Roche Commissions sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant Roche. The latest composer to be commissioned has also been announced: Thomas Adés, who will write a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter to be unveiled in the summer of 2022.
Hard to believe that (as of 1 March) Thomas Adès has now crossed the 50 milestone. For this birthday concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, he takes to the podium to compose Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony and his own InSeven Days for piano and orchestra, with Kirill Gerstein as the soloist.
My essay for the Metropolitan Opera on Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. The Met’s production opens next week and will be the North American premiere:
Not every composer has a knack for finding operatic potential in unlikely sources. But over the past two decades, Thomas Adès has followed his dramaturgical instinct to some of the most spectacular successes in contemporary opera…
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 