Thomas Adès
Renowned as both a composer and a performer, Thomas Adès works regularly with the world's leading orchestras, opera companies, and festivals. Appointed to the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer Chair at Carnegie Hall for 2007–2008, he was featured as composer, conductor, and pianist throughout that season.
Engagements in 2009–2010 include a major composer and artist focus with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; a return to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which he has developed a particularly close relationship; piano recitals in Vancouver and at the Barbican, where Mr. Adès will perform the premieres of his Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face; and his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with whom he will perform Sibelius's The Tempest, Tchaikovsky's The Tempest, and scenes from his own The Tempest.
The many orchestras he has conducted include the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Finnish Symphony Orchestra, and the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. A number of international festivals have chosen to present special focuses on his music. Among these have been Helsinki's Musica Nova (1999), the Salzburg Easter Festival (2004), Radio France's Festival Présences (2007), the Barbican's Traced Overhead (2007), the Mariinsky Theatre's New Horizons Festival in St. Petersburg (2007), and the Stockholm International Composer Festival (2009).
Born in London in 1971, Mr. Adès studied piano and composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Between 1993 and 1995, he was composer in association with the Hallé Orchestra, which resulted in his compositions The Origin of the Harp (1994) and These Premises Are Alarmed for the opening of Bridgewater Hall in 1996. Asyla (1997) was a Feeney Trust commission for Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which toured the work and performed it on Mr. Rattle's last concert as music director in 1998. Mr. Rattle subsequently programmed Asyla in his opening concert as Music Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker in September 2002.
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