Thomas Adès étudie le piano à la Guildhall School of Music & Drama et la musique au King’s College de Cambridge. Compositeur, chef d’orchestre et pianiste de renom, Adès est décrit en 2007 par le New York Times comme l’un des « musiciens les plus accomplis » de notre époque.
Son opéra de chambre, Powder Her Face (1995) est joué partout dans le monde, tandis que The Tempest (2004), commande du Royal Opera House de Londres, est depuis produit par les plus grandes salles du monde, dont le Metropolitan Opera de New York. Il a fait l’objet d’un DVD édité par la Deutsche Grammophon et récompensé par un Grammy Award. Le troisième opéra de Thomas Adès, adaptation du film de Luis Buñuel, L’ange exterminateur, est créé au Festival de Salzbourg en juillet 2016, avant d’être produit à Londres, New York et Copenhague.
De 1993 à 1995, Adès est compositeur associé au Hallé Orchestra, période au cours de laquelle il produit These Premises Are Alarmed à l’occasion de l’inauguration du Bridgewater Hall en 1996. Asyla (1997) est créé pour Sir Simon Rattle et l’Orchestre symphonique de Birmingham. En 2005, Adès propose pour la première fois son Concerto pour violon : Concentric Paths pour Anthony Marwood et l’Orchestre de Chambre d’Europe au Berliner Festspiele et aux BBC Proms. Sa musique de chambre compte deux quatuors à cordes, Arcadiana (1994) et The Four Quarters (2010), un Quintette avec piano (2000) et Lieux retrouvés (2009) pour violoncelle et piano.
Son œuvre Tevot (2007) est commandée par la Philharmonie de Berlin et le Carnegie Hall, tandis que In Seven Days (un concerto pour piano accompagné d’images animées) est donné en 2008 à Londres et Los Angeles. Polaris (2011) est créée pour la première fois à Miami par le New World Symphony sous la direction de Michael Tilson Thomas ; elle est ensuite chorégraphiée avec grand succès par Crystal Pite lors d’une nuit consacrée à Thomas Adès au théâtre Sadler’s Wells de Londres. Parmi les chorégraphes qui ont travaillé sur la musique d’Adès, on compte notamment Karole Armitage, Kim Brandstrup, Wayne McGregor ou encore Ashley Page. Totentanz pour mezzo-soprano, baryton et grand orchestre est présentée au BBC Proms de 2013 par l’Orchestre symphonique de la BBC. Tandis que Luxury Suite from Powder Her Face (2017) est commandée par Sir Simon Rattle et la Philharmonie de Berlin.
Thomas Adès dirige régulièrement la Philharmonie de Los Angeles, l’Orchestre symphonique de Londres, l’Orchestre royal du Concertgebouw, les orchestres symphoniques de Melbourne et de Sydney, l’Orchestre symphonique de la BBC et l’Orchestre symphonique de Birmingham. Il est le premier partenaire artistique de l’Orchestre symphonique de Boston, avec lequel il donne en mars 2019 la première représentation d’un Concerto pour piano et orchestre, accompagné du soliste Kirill Gerstein.
Adès a été récompensé de nombreuses fois, notamment par le Prix musical Léonie-Sonning en 2015, le Prix Leoš Janáček ainsi que le prestigieux Grawemeyer Award (2000), duquel il est le plus jeune lauréat. Il est nommé Commandeur de l’Ordre de l’Empire britannique lors du Queen’s Birthday Honours de 2018. Thomas Adès a été directeur artistique du Festival d’Aldeburgh de 1999 à 2008 et il enseigne chaque année le piano et la musique de chambre au Séminaire international des musiciens de Prussia Cove.
The first movement Allegramente opens with a statement of the theme by piano and then tutti. A march-like bridge passage leads to the more expressive second subject, first played by the piano and then taken up by the orchestra. The development section interrogates the first theme before an octave mini-cadenza leads to the recapitulation ff. There is then a solo cadenza based on the second subject, first played tremolo and then over many octaves, the piano joined first by the horn and then by full orchestra. The movement ends with a coda based on the first theme and the march.
The second movement Andante gravemente consists of a chordal introduction and a melody, which is joined by a countermelody, and a second idea with a simple falling melody over rising harmony. The first melody reappears, leading to a fortissimo climax, subsiding to a final statement of the original theme and a coda based on the countermelody.
The finale Allegro giojoso begins with a three-chord call to arms, and then a tumbling theme for piano and orchestra, which is interrupted by the blustering entry of a clarinet solo, heralding a burlesque canon. There is here a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion as regards key, brought to an end by the call to arms. Eventually the piano takes up a new theme in the style of a ball bouncing downstairs and develops it to a choral climax. The tumbling material is developed, and the call to arms is heard in multiple directions leading to an impasse, a winding down of tempo, and a new slow (Grave) section in three time with a falling theme. This leads to a precipice which the piano falls off with the original tumbling theme, and a coda lining up all the other themes for a final resolution on the call to arms.
Thomas Adès
Totentanz is a setting for two voices and full orchestra of the text accompanying a frieze which hung in the Marienkirche, Lübeck, Germany, depicting every member of society in the Danse Macabre in descending order, beginning with the Pope and ending with the baby. The part of Death is taken by a baritone, and all the human race sung by a mezzo-soprano. It is dedicated to the memory of Witold Lutos?awski and received its world première at the BBC Proms in 2013.
Thomas Adès
Dance, wild but tightly controlled, and all the wilder for being so, dance at once intoxicating and sinister, dance that takes over our bodies as its own – such involving and intemperate dance has been a feature of Adès’s music at least since the third movement of his Asyla. Here it is again, more so than ever before.
The Totentanz, or Dance of Death, was a topic that gripped Europe in the fifteenth century, perhaps because Renaissance humanism, which placed increasing value on the individual life, was coming up against our common human fate. Adès took his image of this ultimate dance, and his text, from a thirty-metre-long hanging of painted cloth made in 1463 for the church of St Mary in the German Baltic city of Lübeck. Itself subject to mortality, the hanging was replaced by a copy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that copy was destroyed during World War II. Reproductions of it, though, have survived, and these for Adès were enough. They showed Death linking hands with representatives of humanity at all levels, addressing each differently in the underlying captions, but with the same ineluctable message, to which each responds, generally with sorrowful resignation.
Adès cuts the cast of human characters from twenty-three to sixteen, adapts the words, and sets Death’s part for a declamatory yet lyrical baritone, while a mezzo-soprano sings for all his victims. In the text, the two voices largely alternate, but with the important difference that where each of the human beings replies directly to Death’s invitation to the dance, Death is always moving on to the next. Adès varies this back-and-forth dialogue in the later stages of his work, but still it remains the case that human reactions, variously expressed as they may be, are all futile. Death is not a great listener.
The interplay between one who only declares and those who hear and answer, between statement and response, between reiterated summons and ever renewed lament, is thrust forward by and within an immense orchestral machine, involving a large percussion section. This machine, we might imagine, gives us the voice of Death’s great ally, Time, which enters with a surge onto whacking chords and then, in octaves across the whole orchestra, introduces the baritone to present, as preacher, this coming ‘play’.
Even while the preacher is addressing us, the dance, which swirls and swells on from an initial oscillation, is already beginning – a piccolo starts it – but it really gets going when the baritone takes on the voice of Death, to call first on the pope. Death’s proposal is different every time, shaped towards the intended recipient, and, in a score that also features incidental word-painting, each human character has a different voice, and a different orchestra. The pope, for instance, sings with upper strings in free rhythm, the cardinal with woodwind and strings in flowing quavers that are perhaps seeking a way out – and fittingly it is here that Death first re-enters, to create a duet. A score of constant variety and telling detail results from the changing scenes, even while the dance is all the time waiting in the wings, ready now and then, between these wasted discussions, to bound forward again.
There are also moments of stillness, of an exquisitely expressed emptiness, as in the dialogue with the monk. Then, after the knight has had his say, with soft drumming and the dance in the oboes, Death becomes more impatient, and rushes through the mayor, the doctor and the usurer. After this comes a slow duet for Death and the merchant, their voices moving together as the orchestra readies itself for the climactic eruption of dance. For a moment this seems to exhaust Death, and he allows the parish clerk to have his say – in a passage of fine pianissimos – before for once chiming in second, lyrically. Two further long scenes follow, with the craftsman (a self-portrait) and the peasant, ‘perhaps representing’, the composer suggests, ‘the extreme opposite poles of human resistance and acceptance, and of Death’s animosity or lack of it.’ From this point we may feel that the dance of death is becoming more a love song of death, leading on to another pianissimo sequence, with the maiden.
Now there remains only, alone in the world, a child. The child has few words, repeating them over and over, with growing passion, before sinking into Death’s arms.
Totentanz was commissioned by Robin Boyle in memory of Witold Lutoslawki (1913-1994) and of his wife Danuta.