Thomas Adès, one of the leading contemporary British composers, has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera in recognition of his innovative work. “If you want to move the frontiers of knowledge, music is in fact an ideal artistic discipline to achieve it,” said the award-winning author of works such as Powder her face, Asyla or The tempest.
The jury has highlighted the “communicative capacity of Adès, which connects transversally with diverse audiences while opening horizons for the future”, highlighting the multiplicity of compositions that its prolific catalog houses with almost 90 works that cover all genres: symphonic, pianistic, chamber music, ballet and opera.
“Emotion is a supreme dimension for every artist. I believe that the rational mind must be transcended to build something new”, the British composer commented after hearing the jury’s decision. “When I’m working I do it mainly through my instinct, a kind of survival.”
Adès creates “a perfect harmony between the ear and the mind,” says VÃctor GarcÃa de Gomar, secretary of the jury and artistic director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu. A quality that gives his “enormously modern” music the ability to connect “affects, linking the rational with the emotional”.
For his part, the Spanish composer Francisco Coll, the only disciple Adès has taught composition, has highlighted in his teacher’s work the ability to achieve a balance between the intellectual part and the emotional element, a music that is complex to write but easy to listen to. . “Rhythmically, his work is very rich and complex, but the result is apparently simple.”
Spain is a country that has deeply marked the British composer, an influence that he combines with the surrealism that he imbibed through his mother, an art historian specializing in this pictorial field. “Surrealism is something very natural to me,” explains the winner, “There is something common out there that we all see, an elephant or a mosquito. What I try to do is listen to my own inner ear.” The Spanish connection was repeated in his last opera, The exterminating angel, based on Buñuel’s film El ángel exterminador, a work that has been staged at the Met in New York or Covent Garden in London.
Born in London in 1971, Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and completed his training with composers Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway at King’s College, Cambridge. Before reaching the age of majority, he had already composed Five Eliot Landscapes, and in 1995, at the age of 24, he premiered his first opera, Powder her face, a reflection of his multiple influences: from Alban Berg or Stravinsky to the tangos by Astor Piazzolla.
Throughout his career he has not been shy about combining seemingly distant genres as he did on Asyla, where he incorporated structures, patterns and rhythms from techno music. “I try to see beyond the physical and think about how it can be transformed, you can easily do that with music, which after all is made of air.”
Adès has been Composer Associate with the Manchester Hallé Orchestra, Music Director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival, Richard and Barbara Debs Chair in Composition at Carnegie Hall, and Artistic Partner of the Manchester Symphony Orchestra. Boston, as well as Britten Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
As a conductor, he performs regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and the Finnish Radio Orchestra.
As a pianist, he has given solo concerts at Carnegie Hall (New York) and Wigmore Hall (London) and is the interpreter of records dedicated to Stravinsky’s compositions for violin and piano and Janácek’s works, as well as the volume American Counterpoint , in which Sir Simon Rattle and Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony.
