On 4 May Thomas Adès gives the Hungarian debut of his 2022 song cycle Növények with mezzo soprano Katalin Károlyi and the UMZE Chamber Ensemble at the Budapest Music Centre; on 9 May he conducts the ensemble in the national premiere of his mercurial Chamber Symphony (1990). Adès presents the concerts as this year’s guest professor of the Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation, where he will work alongside young composers and conductors. The 9 May concert is part of the ongoing celebrations of the centenary of György Kurtág, with whom Adès has had a close association with since studying with the composer at IMS Prussia Cove, and whose works he has conducted over the last season with the Czech Philharmonic and Hallé.
Növények is Adès’ first set of original songs in nearly thirty years, it sets four great Hungarian poets: Attila József (1905-1937), Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), Sándor Weöres (1913-1989) and Otto Orbán (1936-2002). Károlyi has presented the songs at Wigmore Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Fondation Louis Vuitton, LSO St. Luke’s, and with players from the Boston Symphony and Zürich Tonhalle orchestras. Adès writes of the work,
The word Növények means plants, but with the sense of ‘things that grow’ rather than ‘things that are stuck in the ground’. All the poems use botanical images as metaphors for aspects of the human condition. The metaphor is particularly direct in the case of Radnóti, who was murdered by Hungarian troops loyal to the Nazis. His last poems, including ‘Gyökér’, were found in a notebook in his coat pocket when his body was exhumed over a year later.
The world premiere recording was released in November 2025 by Platoon, with mezzo soprano Katalin Károlyi, Ruisi Quartet, Joseph Havlat, and Graham Mitchell – the lineup that premiered the17-minute work at Wigmore Hall in 2022. The composer discusses the piece with Ruisi Quartet on the Gramophone Podcast here.
Adès’ Chamber Symphony is a 13-minute compression of the four-part symphonic structure into one continuous movement, for an ensemble of fifteen players. Originally conceived as concerto for basset clarinet, Adès found when composing the work “the accompanying chamber ensemble became infected with the personality of the solo instrument, until the whole group represented in my mind a super-basset-clarinet with strings”. The work proliferates various basset clarinet imitators and substitutes, alongside a relentless rhythm section of unpitched percussion Adès calls “almost cardiac”.