In September 2024 the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård presented a double-bill of works by Thomas Adès, comprising The Exterminating Angel Symphony and Violin Concerto, for which they were joined by Leila Josefowicz.
The Exterminating Angel Symphony, 20 minutes in length, follows the action of the acclaimed 2016 opera in four movements: the introduction of the guests, a ferocious, apocalyptic March, and a sensuous ‘Berceuse’. The final movement, ‘Waltzes’, which Adès described as ‘joining together the bits of a broken porcelain object’, creates a wholly new piece from the ghostly dance fragments that appear throughout the opera.
Since its debut in 2021 at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall from the CBSO, the work has been performed over thirty times by orchestras including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Berlin Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and National Orchestra of Spain, conducted on numerous occasions by the composer.
Adès’ 2005 Violin Concerto follows a traditional fast-slow-fast pattern across its 20-minute span, with an enlarged middle movement – the work’s centre of emotional and musical gravity. It begins with a freewheeling perpetuum mobile (‘Rings’) with restless rising figures passed back and forth between soloist and woodwinds. ‘Paths’ follows and is created from, as Adès puts it, “two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution”; a cyclic character comes from chaconne-like repetitions of the movement’s opening sequence. The finale – Rounds – hints at a traditional rondo.
Josefowicz will return to the Violin Concerto several times across the 24/25 season. She and Søndergård perform the work again with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on 10 October; she then presents the work with the Dresdner Philharmoniker on 12 and 13 October with Dalia Stasevska. In November she will play it with the San Diego Symphony conducted by Elena Schwarz. A newly-published edition of the score for solo part and piano reduction, with the solo part edited by Anthony Marwood, is now available to purchase.