One of today’s most acclaimed and in-demand composers, Thomas Adès is best-known for works such as the opera Powder Her Face, the Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’ and Asyla for orchestra. On 3 & 6 April, he conducts the Hallé in Manchester, both concerts featuring his own music.
Music that changed me
My earliest experience of music was as a manifestation of the physical world: SCHUBERT’s ‘Trout’ Quintet merged with the patterns of light on water reflected on a ceiling. I was kept quiet (ish) on long car journeys by tapes of his songs and of the Octet. I found his songs extended this merging into emotional paradoxes: Lachen und Weinen, happiness and sadness at once. This feeling of music and life merged into one was my main experience of the world. The mystery of his Octet is still how it can be so tender and intimate, even domestic, and at the same time cosmically vast. I feel that the music is fully aware of this irony.
By about ten, I was obsessed with CHOPIN, firstly the ‘Polonaise héroïque’ – a space with no floor and no ceiling, all certainties immediately undermined. In such a turbulent universe, anything could happen; he can drift unimaginably far and come crashing back with ferocious force. Another paradox: the widest yearning to roam, with such homesickness.
My father says after he showed me my first notes I pushed him off the piano stool. I was also one of those babies who liked the different noises objects made. When my mother needed her saucepans and wooden spoons back, I was given a beautiful snare drum, then hi-hat cymbals, a cowbell, a woodblock: my favourite things. Growing into adolescence, I loved music with a lot of percussion as I could get involved at home: Varèse, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. My favourite was WALTON’s Façade – I would try to play along with the score to the Cathy Berberian/Robert Tear recording. In Façade too, I’m allured by the paradox: delicious flippancy (1920s cowbell and Edith Sitwell’s quicksilver poetry) dancing over an abyss of damnation and desolation: ‘Why did the cock crow? Why am I lost, Down the endless road to infinity tossed?’
STRAVINSKY’s Les Noces bowled me over, and I’ve stayed bowled over. It was real life: the chaotic wedding, the singers playing different parts, as if a hand-held camera swooped through the party picking up every rank detail. But it was controlled chaos – precise in every rhythm, harmony and tune after tune. It isn’t concert music – it’s a village knees-up. It is wildly joyful
