Thomas Adès

Thomas Adès is an innovative British composer, pianist and conductor known principally for his diverse compositional oeuvre. Born in London on March 1st, 1971, Adès studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and at King’s College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a double starred first in 1992.

By the time he’d completed his studies, Adès had already composed multiple works including Five Eliot Landscapes, Chamber Symphony and Still Sorrowing, and although a career as a concert pianist had been a long held dream of his since childhood, by the early 1990s Adès had become chiefly concerned with composition.

Known for his profoundly original and emotionally engaging music, Adès’ most renowned works to date include the orchestral piece Asyla (1997), America: A Prophecy (1999) - a composition for mezzo-soprano, orchestra and optional chorus, and The Tempest (2004) - an opera based on the Shakespeare play. He has also worked combining music with visual art forms, most notably in the 2008 piece In Seven Days and the 2010 piece Polaris (both in collaboration with filmmaker / video artist Tal Rosner). In 2020 - at the height of the global pandemic - Adès wrote Dawn: A Chacony for Orchestra at Any Distance, a piece designed to work with an orchestra of flexible size and with players placed around the hall in compliance with social distancing rules of the time.

Adès often leads performances of his own work, as well as conducting a broad repertoire of orchestral and operatic music with many of the world’s most renowned orchestras. In particular he has established strong links with the London and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham and Boston Symphony Orchestras, and Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra (where he is currently Artist in Residence), with his conducting consistently credited as inspiring some of the orchestra’s finest work.

Throughout his career, Adès has received numerous awards and accolades including the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022), an Ivor Novello Award for Best Chamber Ensemble Composition (2023), and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal (2024). He was also runner-up in the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition (1990) and is the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (2000).