Klaus Mäkelä conducted music by Thomas Adès for the first time in November 2024, giving two performance of Asyla (1997) with the Oslo Philharmonic. Adès’ 25-minute orchestral work, premiered by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1997, won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2000. Cast in four movements, its title suggests both places of refuge as well as enclaves of madness, capturing the various moods of the work, by turns lush, enchanting, frenetic, and ethereal.
Matias Tarnopolsky calls the piece “an exploration of the pull between the safety of tradition, and daunting freedom…the first movement evokes a sense of motion across open spaces, the inner two movements take place as if in an enclosed setting, and the finale bursts these confines to provide a final, unexpected release.” The work’s surface shimmers with metallic percussion – tin cans, timpani rapped on their metal shells – and is given an uneasy glow from an upright piano tuned a quarter-tone flat. An orgiastic third movement, ‘Ecstasio’, recalls the feverish atmosphere of a night club.
Asyla has received over 200 performances internationally since its debut. Aside from Rattle, who included the piece in his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002, its exponents have included Christoph von Dohnányi, Ingo Metzmacher, Sakari Oramo, Marin Alsop, Daniel Harding, Vladimir Jurowski; Adès has conducted the piece with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, CBSO, Gulbenkian Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Danish National Symphony Orchestra when he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 2015.
In June 2024 Asyla received a new choreographic treatment from Oregon Ballet Theatre by Andrea Schermoly, as part of their mixed programme Made in Portland at the Newmark Theatre. Schermoly’s ASLYA took inspiration from “the surreal underworld of crows” and imagines a terrifying avian mob, with looming feathered costumed for the corps de ballet and a huge wiry sculpture hanging over the stage. The piece has previously been choreographed by Cathy Marston for the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in 2004.