In November and December 2025 Thomas Adès joined the Czech Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras for national premieres of The Exterminating Angel Symphony, Air – Homage to Sibelius (with violinist Josef Špaček) in Prague and Inferno in Amsterdam (a Concertgebouw co-commission).
The concert in Prague opened Adès’ residency with the orchestra, with the programme a tribute to Pierre Boulez that included a performance of Messagesquisse, alongside works by Ravel, Kurtág and Busoni. In Amsterdam Adès was joined by Yuja Wang for Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2.
The Exterminating Angel Symphony is a 2020 orchestral rendering of the acclaimed 2016 opera. The 20-minute work is cast 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. In November 2025 the world premiere recording was released by the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård on Pentatone. Listen here.
Air – Homage to Sibelius is a 15-minute work premiered in 2022 by Anne-Sophie Mutter at the Lucerne Festival. Air is an inverted chaconne, led by the suspended violin line. Adès’ described his use of the form in an interview with Thomas May in 2023:
I have united two things in this new piece as regards the passacaglia or chaconne model. One is quite a Baroque idea of the passacaglia at the beginning of a sort that Henry Purcell might possibly have done, although the idea is turned on its head so that the whole thing hangs down from the high treble. But then I turn it into a spiral so that rather than always repeating in the same time, which it does the first few times, the theme starts to spiral upwards.
The work has subsequently appeared with Andris Nelsons and Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus; Adès has conducted the work the London Symphony Orchestra (with Mutter) and the Hallé (with the violinist Stephen Waarts).
Inferno is the first part of Adès’ ballet Dante, which debuted complete at the Royal Ballet in 2021, choreographed by Wayne McGregor with designs by Tacita Dean; the world premiere recording of the work, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel on Nonesuch, won a Grammy in 2024 for Best Orchestral Performance.
A 45-minute portrait of Dante and Virgil’s journey into Hell, Inferno unfolds over 13 sections. The work is imbued with the spirit of Liszt. “Liszt really owns hell and the demoniacal’ Adès has noted. ‘I looked at what he’d done, and those sounds that arose in him were still completely live cultures. I could put them in passages and new things would happen. So the music in Inferno moves from absolutely 100% me, to 100% Liszt and every gradation in between. I wanted to have this strange feeling that you were almost falling down into the past.”
It features a dark-hued rendering of Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondola to usher in The Ferryman who rows dead souls across the river Styx; an extravagant, riotous orchestration of the Grand Galop Chromatique is a virtuosic representation of the reptilian Thieves. Adès revisits other musical forms across the piece – a Pavan for the souls trapped in Limbo, and a Tchaikovskian Adagio to represent the ambitious Popes, buried heads down. In April 2025 the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s own label released Adès’ world premiere recording of the Inferno Suite – an 18 ½-minute selection from the ballet’s opening part.