Poetry instead of pose
He has composed perhaps the most sought-after Opus 1 of recent decades, a portrait of him hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. And he has achieved something that many dream of: working without deadlines. An approach to Thomas Adès, our Creative Chair 2O25/26.
It's a gift of a late summer's day in September - the first intensive phase of work with our new Creative Chair: masterclass at the ZHdK, rehearsals for the season opening and for chamber music with our musicians, photo and press appointments. We combine the interview with a trip to the lake - and Thomas Adès watches the colourful hustle and bustle on the Rentenwiese with enthusiasm. Two toddlers with glow-in-the-dark ribbons perform a crawling ballet. "It's marvellous," he laughs, "I'd love to write the music for it."
Thomas Adès undoubtedly has a flair for all things theatrical - whether in everyday situations or on the international stage. His opera "Powder Her Face" brought him his breakthrough in 1995. Since then, his works have been among the most frequently performed and sought-after compositions of the present day. But his opus 1, "Five Eliot Landscapes" for soprano and piano, was already highly sought after: Adès was only 18 years old and three publishers were vying to publish the piece.
He still has a queue of clients today. And the queue is so long that he made a decision: compose without deadlines. "I was constantly under deadline pressure for 35 years. At some point, I simply stopped accepting commissions. And finally, one day, I had completed all the tasks on my list and was free. It was really nice to get up in the morning. I worked just as much as before when I still had to meet deadlines, but it was great to have this freedom for a while."
The right moment
Our focus artist Kirill Gerstein also knew that Adès had a long to-do list. Nevertheless, he asked him if he could write a piano concerto - and was rewarded in 2018. A year later, he played the celebrated premiere in Boston. "Kirill simply asked at the right moment," Adès recalls. Now they are presenting the work together in Zurich.
The two have a deep artistic friendship and are enthusiastic about each other's work. "He is one of the most natural musicians," Adès enthuses about Gerstein. "He's also a jazz musician, he studied jazz. But at the same time, he is a true virtuoso of the old school. He can sit down and play these pieces, the Brahms concertos, the Busoni concerto. He is absolutely authentic. But he interprets these works as if they were improvisation, as if they were jazz. That's what sets him apart."
This organic closeness to music history also characterises Adès' music. These are not showy quotations, but you can sense that he has deeply internalised them and lets them flash up playfully. An early encounter with the composer György Kurtág was formative: at the age of 18, Adès went to Hungary to study with him in Szombathely. At the festival there, he experienced performances of many songs in Hungarian - "and I not only heard the performances, but also how he worked with the singers on the songs, which consisted of very short texts. I learnt to understand how the language sounds, how it is structured, and that has stayed with me."
To this day, Hungarian has a special significance for Adès: this could be heard at the beginning of the season in the Kleine Tonhalle, where he performed his cycle "Növények" as a pianist together with five string players and a mezzo-soprano. "It's a fantastic language to set to music because it's crystal clear, has this powerful rhythm and these powerful images." He recently set songs to music in Hungarian again and is currently working with German poems - this is due to the appropriate "geometry": "The poetry of these languages is better suited to my music. Even in poetic English, there tend to be a lot of small, complicated conversational words. In German, on the other hand, you can summarise things in one word. It's just more suited to my way of thinking musically than my native English."
Wiggled out of the picture
The British composer is revered in his home country. There has even been a painting of him hanging in the National Portrait Gallery since 2002 - but not a classical one, nor a heroic one. There are various anecdotes about this picture painted by Phil Hale: For example, Adès recounts with amusement that he always wore light-coloured suits at the time because he was in charge of the Aldeburgh Festival, one of the most famous summer festivals in England. "I had two suits, but I had ruined one of the jackets. As it was an official appointment, a formal portrait, I thought, okay, then I have to wear a suit. So I took the jacket from one suit and the trousers from the other." But the colour nuances caught the painter's eye and he captured them. "He's an exceptional artist, I love everything about this painting. You can see a man in a suit - but also that this is not at all someone who is wearing a suit and is the director of a festival. That was absolutely right."
In addition, Phil Hale has captured the composer in a pose that is surprising - because it is not a proud, representative pose. Instead, Adès hangs in an armchair, almost flowing out of it: "I look like I'm trying to wriggle out of the picture. And anyone who knows me knows that this is my true portrait." For our sake, he also took a few official photos for this magazine - perhaps we'll spare him on our next visit.
Kirill Gerstein on Thomas Adès' piano concerto
"I have known Thomas Adès for almost twenty years, we are close friends and have often performed together: in orchestral concerts that he has conducted or as a piano duo. The concerto he wrote for me in 2018 means a lot to me. I can feel the connection between us in it - and perhaps the audience can feel it too.
In my opinion, it is one of the most important and best piano concertos written in the last 70 years. It is on a par with the concertos by Prokofiev and Ravel, but at the same time it looks to the left and right in a very relaxed way. Adès is deeply connected to music history, he is almost encyclopaedic in his knowledge - but he has his own prism through which all this is illuminated. Formally, this concerto takes up much of the tradition: the three-movement structure, the cadenzas, the slow second movement. The audience can therefore easily orientate themselves. Nevertheless, the music is not a bit populist; you can experience the traditional model in a completely new way here.
The premiere in Boston in 2019 was a success, not only with the audience; the demand from the organisers was also unusually high. I have now performed the concerto around 80 times, often under the direction of the composer. But it remains a challenge: it is very virtuosic, very rhythmic. After a performance, you feel a bit like after a Rachmaninov concert: you've played something."