Looking for diamonds
Whether conducting or composing, Thomas Adès is always searching for sparkle
Mathias Benguigui
- Michael Hodges
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The Proms really are important to Thomas Adès. “They are like nothing else,” says the British conductor and world-renowned composer, who will be in charge of the National Youth Orchestra (NYO) on Saturday night. “From 11 through to 15 years old I was there all summer. I remember sleeping out so I could be at the front for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I was standing directly behind Claudio Abbado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. It was completely overwhelming and I can still feel the emotion from that. Any problems I might have had, they didn’t matter.”
Adès, whose work seems to compress great forces that challenge listener and orchestra alike, will lead the teenagers of the NYO through Purgatorio, the central section of his three-part ballet score Dante, at the Royal Albert Hall.
“The NYO can play as well as any professional orchestra,” the 55-year-old says, but these super-talented young musicians bring something else. “They’re discovering everything for the first time; for the conductor that means that you can really create a feeling of excitement. It has this extra kind of fierceness and vividness to it, a unique energy and total commitment.”
Adès was in the NYO himself, as a youthful percussionist. “Only for a year, but it was a wonderful year.” Being caught up by classical music when you are young becomes, he says, “a passion, a real obsession. It’s a force that’s too strong to resist if it takes you.”
Thomas Adès with the NYO in 2014. Jason Alden
That sounds like a combustible mix. Is it wise to introduce, alongside Dante’s “cleansing fires of purgatory”, the devilry of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique? “The Symphonie fantastique is a wild and extraordinary piece with very adult themes,” he says. “But young people are fascinated by adult themes!”
Those themes featured in his breakthrough opera Powder Her Face in 1995 with its infamous fellatio scene (so shocking Classic FM declined to broadcast the work). Adès was attracted to Dante’s Inferno as source material because “the stories are so sensational, they make you catch your breath”.
Brought up in Hampstead, north London, the son of an art historian and a poet, and privately educated, Adès is from a privileged background and fears for those with similar abilities in the state system. “I hear a lot from colleagues about the dire situation with schools and funding at the moment.” Fixing that “is central”, especially in less affluent communities.
Classical music is a passion – a force too strong to resist
“It’s snobbery to assume that just because someone’s from one background or another they won’t be interested in this or that. That’s not how it works – many composers, artists and musicians came from very underprivileged backgrounds. It’s the old Billy Elliot thing of, ‘How could someone from a mining community possibly be interested in ballet?’”
He also uses a mining analogy when he likens composing to digging under the ground. “I look forward to going back down there because I think, as I get used to the darkness, I manage to see what I’m looking for. The kind of diamonds or the gold or whatever it is that sparkle for me. And with any luck, some of them will sparkle for someone else, too. That’s what the hope is.”
This isn’t Adès’s only Prom this summer. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the great Gustavo Dudamel (soon departing as their music director) will perform Inferno, part one of Adès’s Dante. “He won a Grammy [2024] for his recording of it, which had incredible brilliance and mastery,” says Adès of Dudamel. “So it’s terrifically exciting for me that he’s chosen to do Inferno at the Proms.”
In September, Adès will join the Hallé as principal guest conductor, a fond return to the Manchester orchestra where he was a composer in residence between 1993 and 1999. As well as all this, he says he has a new piece on the go – “I always do!”
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Where does he get the energy? “Music is a powerful source of energy,” he says. “It’s a kind of electric charge. Sometimes you actually have to remember to sit down and breathe. Your system needs time to recharge.” On the plus side, any problems you might have don’t matter.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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