Thomas Adès’ tenure as Creative Chair of Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich continues on 5 March with Franz Welser-Möst conducting The Exterminating Angel Symphony.
The 20-minute work is an orchestral rendering of the acclaimed 2016 opera, with four movements following its action: the introduction of the guests, a ferocious, apocalyptic March, and a sensuous ‘Berceuse’. The 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. In 2022 Welser-Möst conducted the US premiere of the piece with the Cleveland Orchestra; in November 2025 the world premiere recording was released by the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård on Pentatone. Listen here.
Musicians from the Tonhalle-Orchester also perform Adès’ playful Catch for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello in a chamber concert on 5 March. The 9-minute work is structured around various combinations of the quartet, with several games going on: the clarinet is the outsider, the other three are the unit, then, after a decoy entry, the clarinet takes the initiative.
On 11 March Paavo Järvi joins the orchestra for Adès’ mercurial reworkings of French baroque music Three Studies from Couperin. In January 2026 Järvi gave the national premiere of …but all shall be well (1993) as part of the focus – 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. The conductor opened the focus in September with Swiss premiere of Dawn – a 7-minute ‘chacony’ conceived with flexible instrumentation, in which Adès imagines “sunrise as a constant event that moves continuously around the world.
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 have 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.