Thomas Adès began his tenure as Creative Chair of Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on 17 September, where he will feature as composer, conductor and pianist in the 2025/26 season.
The focus began with the Swiss premiere of Dawn with Paavo Järvi; a 7-minute ‘chacony’ conceived with flexible instrumentation, in which Adès imagines “sunrise as a constant event that moves continuously around the world. On 21 September Adès joined musicians from the orchestra and mezzo-soprano Katalin Károlyi for the national debut of Növények. The 17-minute piece is Adès’ first set of original songs in nearly thirty years and sets four great Hungarian poets: Attila József (1905-1937), Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), Sándor Weöres (1913-1989) and Otto Orbán (1936-2002). Károlyi and Adès have previously presented the songs at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and LSO St. Luke’s.
January 2026 will see Järvi 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 and with instrumentation loosely based on Britten’s War Requiem. In March Franz Welser-Möst conducts The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020). The 20-minute work follows the action of the acclaimed 2016 opera; its finale, ‘Waltzes’, which Adès described as ‘joining together the bits of a broken porcelain object’, is a wholly new piece created from ghostly dance fragments that appear throughout the opera.
Chamber concerts in December, March, and April from members of the orchestra will include 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’ – music for the same forces drawn from his 2003 opera; Adès’ 3-minute Overture from the piece opens concerts with Marie Jacquot 23 and 24 April.
In June 2026 Adès takes to the podium to conclude the focus, renewing his celebrated partnership with pianist Kirill Gerstein. Together they present the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – a work they performed dozens of times – and give a duo recital featuring the Concert Paraphrase on “Powder Her Face”, alongside music by Ligeti and Messiaen.
Adès will also conduct the Swiss premiere of Aquifer, a 17-minute work whose material surges and subsides in the manner of an underground channel of water coursing through layers of rock. Premiering with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle in 2024 and recorded by Adès and The Hallé, it will also appear with the London Symphony Orchestra, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony in the upcoming season.