Thomas Adès travelled to Australia this Autumn for a composer focus at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House.  The prominent events hosted by these two major cities showcased some of Adès' most acclaimed works, alongside other Adès focused events including chamber recitals and a concert featuring musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM).

Click here to listen to this recent interview which took place between Thomas Adès (in Los Angeles) and Andrew Ford (in Melbourne) for Australia's national radio station ABC, prior to the 2010 Melbourne Festival in October in which Thomas Adès was a featured composer, also taking part as conductor and pianist.

Click
here to read this recent preview (& interview) to the festival in The Australian.

Press Comments:

'Thomas Adès is one of the most original compositional voices in a quasi-modernist/postmodernist vein to emerge from Britain in decades.

The most striking things about his Asyla, which he conducted with commanding precision, were the originality of its textures and the way these unfolded with elusive logic to create a highly original narrative of sound and shape.
There were carefully layered counterpoints like shifting geological strata, dark melodic passages on bass oboe, steely flashes with strange fluorescent afterglows and moments of fierceness and radiance.'
Sydney Morning Herald (Peter McCallum), 22 October 2010


To read the full review,
click here

Melbourne Festival Diary
10 October – Adès & The Calder Quartet
Adès spends part of each year in Los Angeles, which is where he met the Calder Quartet who have performed and recorded Arcadiana.  They have since worked together with great success in Stockholm at the Adès Tonsätterfestival. In Melbourne they perform the Piano Quintet – originally a Melbourne Festival commission.
 
12 October – Adès and ANAM
Adès directs musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music in a program of his own: Les Baricades Mistérieuses, Three Studies from Couperin and Chamber Symphony plus other music by Couperin & Rameau.
 
15 October – Adès & Melbourne SO
Adès conducts the renowned Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in a programme featuring his violin concerto with Anthony Marwood, alongside the Australian premiere of his multi-media piano concerto In Seven Days.
 
21 October
Pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, multi-disciplinary musician Anthony Pateras and musicians of the Academy perform Adès’ Living Toys.