Thomas Adés

Described by the New York Times in 2007 as one of today’s ‘most accomplished overall musicians’, Thomas’s chamber opera Powder Her Face (1995) has been performed worldwide whilst The Tempest (2004) was commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House and has since been taken up by international houses including New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where it was recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon DVD which subsequently won a Grammy Award. Adès’s third opera, after Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in July 2016 before travelling to London, New York and Copenhagen; in 2024 it received a critically-acclaimed staging from Calixto Bieito at the Opéra national de Paris.

 

Thomas has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Léonie Sonning Music Prize, the Leoš Janáček Award, and the Grawemeyer Award (2000), of which he was the youngest ever recipient. In 2023 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge prize. He was awarded a CBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Thomas was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1999 to 2008. He performs worldwide as a pianist, and coaches annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.

 

The following comes from a 2011 piece on Thomas in The Times:

 

“Adès knew he was gay from a young age. “It was pretty tough, it can be very distressing if you think you are the only one. You create this scenario where it’s this huge tragic burden. It’s not like talking about a food you don’t like. It’s about sex. I thought I was Tchaikovsky, tortured and in pain, and listened to his music — all that misery and desperation — and thinking it was because he was teased for being gay. Now I think he was probably having a riotous time.”

 

The writer Philip Hensher once described Adès’s charismatic presence at Cambridge (where he achieved a double-starred first in music) as akin to “Mahler on the streets of Vienna”. That elicits another Adès guffaw.

 

“I didn’t feel particularly brilliant so I worked extra hard. I talked to an interviewer freely about Mozart, and he thought I was comparing myself to Mozart, which would obviously be mad. That’s when I withdrew. If my personality was going to be an obstacle, there was no point putting myself out there.””