November 2025 saw the release of two new world premiere recordings of Thomas Adès. The Exterminating Angel Symphony – a 2020 orchestral rendering of the acclaimed 2016 opera – makes its debut on disc from the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård, released by Pentatone. Listen here.
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.
The recording also features a new account of the Violin Concerto from Leila Josefowicz. The violinist is one of the work’s most enthusiastic champions, having given sixty performances of the work to date.
File this release under “sonic spectaculars”…The orchestral playing and the recorded sound are magnificent…a chain of grinding fortissimo chords march along through often surprising harmonic shifts, supported by a menacing side-drum tattoo, and the textural clarity is enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The Times (Geoff Brown) 21 November 2025 *****
Adès is a composer with the capacity to seduce and terrify in equal measure – both extremes are in evidence on this captivating album. The Exterminating Angel Symphony juxtaposes queasily swooping and relentlessly bombastic brass with anguished strings…while Josefowicz is raw and edgy…
BBC Music Magazine (Charlotte Smith) December 2025 ****
Josefowicz must know the piece better than any other violinist…she plays the piece with muscular abandon, never afraid to bring grit and power as well as soaring lyricism…Before the concerto, there’s a thrilling recording of The Exterminating Symphony…Top-drawer Adès…
BBC Radio 3, Record Review (Andrew Macgregor) 22 November 2025
The orchestration is lush and fatalistic…Waltzes from different parts of the opera, both cheerful and threatening, swirl through the orchestra…Josefowicz finds a convincingly sensitive approach, developing her imaginatively illuminated interpretation from stupendous technical abilities.
Pizzicato (Remy Franck) 17 November 2025 *****
The opera is a dark comedy and ripe material for Adès’ larger-than-life orchestral imagination. There is more than a hint of the grotesque…an impressive piece on its own terms…a successful addition to Adès’ orchestral oeuvre.
The Arts Desk (Bernard Hughes) 22 November 2025
Adès’ Növények was released on 21 November by Platoon, recorded by 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 new recording with Ruisi Quartet on the Gramophone Podcast here.
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.
Another world premiere recording of Adès is forthcoming in December, with a digital EP of Forgotten Dances for solo guitar from Sean Shibe; the physical release of the work, on his album Vesper, is forthcoming in April 2026. Shibe will perform excerpts from Forgotten Dances at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert on 3 December.