Thomas Adès’ took to the podium on 24 and 25 June to conclude his tenure as Creative Chair of Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich with the Swiss premieres of Aquifer and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with its champion Kirill Gerstein as soloist; the pair also give a duo recital featuring the Concert Paraphrase on “Powder Her Face”, alongside music by Ligeti and Messiaen.
Aquifer is a 17-minute work whose material surges and subsides in the manner of an underground channel of water coursing through layers of rock. Cast in one movement built from seven sections, it begins by welling up from the deepest notes, its currents slowing, finding new pathways, and bursting forth again as the work unfolds. At last, it culminates in an ecstatic coda. Premiering with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle in 2024 and recorded by Adès and The Hallé, Adès has conducted it with London Symphony Orchestra, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony in the 2025/26 season.
To date, Kirill Gerstein has given 70 performances of Adès’ Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, many with Adès on the rostrum; he recorded the Concerto with the Boston Symphony and the composer in 2019. They have presented the piece together with the Chicago Symphony, Concertgebouw, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Bavarian Radio, and London Symphony Orchestra.
Its three movements follow a traditional pattern. The opening Allegramente contrasts a rhythmic first theme with a more expressive second subject. A glowering chorale from woodwinds and brass introduces the Andante gravemente, before the searching melody that ensues in the piano strives for an effusive climax. The Allegro giojoso finale begins with a call to arms that precipitates a burlesque canon. The piano then takes up a tumbling melody “in the style of a ball bouncing down stairs”, as Adès puts it, which then winds down before falling off another precipice and tripping towards a joyful conclusion.
The season-long focus began with the Swiss premiere of Dawn with Paavo Järvi; a 7-minute ‘chacony’, with Adès also joining musicians from the orchestra and mezzo-soprano Katalin Károlyi for the national debut of Növények, a 17-minute setting of seven Hungarian poems and first set of original songs in nearly thirty years. January 2026 sawJärvi also give the national premiere of …but all shall be well (1993) – Adès’ first large-scale orchestral work, inspired by lines from T.S. Eliot and Julian of Norwich. In March Franz Welser-Möst conducted The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020) - a 20-minute orchestral montage created from his acclaimed 2016 opera.
A chamber series included Adès’ Souvenir from his soundtrack to the film Colette and Catch, a 9-minute quartet for clarinet, piano, violin and cello, as well as Court Studies from ‘The Tempest’; Adès’ 3-minute Overture from the piece opens concerts with Marie Jacquot 23 and 24 April.