Thomas Adès’ album conducting works by himself, Oliver Leith, and William Marsey documenting his artistic residency with the Hallé Orchestra has been celebrated by critics following its release on 5 July 2025 - listen here.
The album, released on the Hallé’s own label, contains the world premiere recording of Adès’ Aquifer, which premiered in 2024 with Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Tower – for Frank Gehry (2021) – a 2 ½-minute fanfare for thirteen trumpets. Adès offers his own accounts of Shanty – Over the Sea for strings and Dawn, a ‘chacony for orchestra at any distance’, both from 2020. It also includes the debut recording of Oliver Leith’s Cartoon Sun, commissioned by the Hallé Concerts Society to mark Adès’ first year of his residency, along with William Marsey’s Man With Limp Wrist.
Aquifer…contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long…both Shanty and Dawn…work wonders with repeated phrases…Leith’s wacky processional, punctuated by enormous climaxes, leaves an exhilarating impression…altogether an impressive disc, a fine record of a productive association…
The Guardian (Andrew Clements) 4 July 2025 ****
[Aquifer] is one of Adès’s virtuoso orchestral scores… alive with its own atmosphere and original sounds, and very tautly written…Adès’s inventiveness never deserts him… Marsey’s musical narrative is a strangely evocative succession of musical ghosts…Cartoon Sun’s…constant sense of latent expressive power confirms [Leith’s] reputation as a composer to watch.
Financial Times (Richard Fairman) 4 July 2025 ****
Adès’ music has always been concerned with exploring a kind of reinvented consonance…both Shanty and Dawn provide striking new takes on this idea…[Shanty] retains a sense of delight in the complexity that can arise from different voices singing…Dawn makes something remarkable out of the idea of sunrise…a form of constant rotation which allows the composer to draw ever new orchestral colours…
Gramophone (John Fallas) August 2025
Shanty has an appropriately tentative air, mechanical lower plucked strings are set against sliding upper strings in a hypnotic web, repetitive but never quite repeating…[Dawn] has a defiant beauty, with Adès ear for sonority as keen as ever…[Aquifer] is a return in some ways to the drama of earlier pieces like Polaris or Tevot, dense and knotty…the music developing with a geological deliberation and inexorability.
[Leith’s] piece embraces…simplicity with heft. There are bells, both quiet and riotous, a sunrise in which the orchestration glistens, and as the music takes its time, time itself gets suspended. It’s a very effective and thought-provoking piece, and a terrific album of new music.
The Arts Desk (Graham Rickson) 5 July 2025
Aquifer is cast in one movement built from seven sections. Its title recalls an underground layer of permeable rock through which water can pass, and the work begins by welling up from the lowest notes before sweeping all of the orchestra along with it. By turns its material courses forward in a torrential stream and finds itself diverted or pooling, or blocked off. An ecstatic coda sees the fast-flowing break through into a triumphant C major.
An intricate 8-minute work strings, Shanty was Adès’ first essay in the medium. He calls it “a repetitive, communal ritual thing…designed to create a kind of protective mantra around people who are embarking on great peril…Embarkation…It is one of the most human desires: to go somewhere.” Dawn is a 7-minute work conceived with flexible instrumentation, with scope for the placement of its players around the hall in myriad ways. Adès imagines “the sunrise as a constant event that moves continuously around the world”, the chaconne providing the means for this perpetual musical revelation.
Leith’s Cartoon Sun a 14-minute work is inspired by bells in their numerous forms, making use of pitched and unpitched varieties in varied sizes and shapes – church bells, cowbells, tubular bells (including one dipped in a bucket of water) and sleigh bells.Beginning with a ‘Bell cannon fantasy’, the piece moves from quiet solemnity into blazing, technicolour radiance, closing with ‘a wink from the sun’, as Leith puts it.