November 2024 saw Thomas Adès in focus across three concerts at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, as composer, conductor, and pianist. He was joined during the residency by collaborators including Mark Simpson, Quatuor Diotima, Katalin Karolyi, and the Ruisi Quartet, culminating with Adès conducting Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Nicolas Altstaedt on 16 November.
On 12 November Adès joined Katalin Károlyi, Ruisi Quartet, and Graham Mitchell for the first French performance of Növények, seven Hungarian poems for mezzo-soprano and piano sextet. 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). The concert also included the French premiere of Oliver Leith’s A different ‘Fantasie from Suite no.5 in G minor’ - a 4 ½-minute work based on music by Matthew Locke (c.1621 – 1677), which appeared on Ruisi Quartet’s 2023 debut recording Big House.
Adès’ performance with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen included Lieux retrouvés for cello and small orchestra and Shanty – Over the Sea, the latter receiving its French premiere; they gave the same programme the day prior in Bremen. Originally written as a cello and piano work for Steven Isserlis in 2009, Lieux retrouvés is four pictures of places recalled. It evokes flowing waters, mountainous peaks, and sunlit amble through the countryside. The finale’s cityscape – ‘La ville’ – is a ghoulish homage to Offenbach, animated by a ‘cancan macabre’; the 17-minute work was recorded by Tomas Nuñez with Nicholas Collon and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2023. An intricate 8-minute work strings, Shanty was Adès’ first essay in the medium, and also a piece preoccupied with travel. 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.”
A performance on 8 November saw Mark Simpson and Quatuor Diotima return to Adès’ 20-minute basset clarinet quintet Alchymia, which they premiered in 2021 and have since performed a dozen times internationally and recorded on Orchid Classics. With Adès at the keyboard, they also gave the first French performance of Four Berceuses from ‘The Exterminating Angel’ – and 11-minute arrangement for clarinet, viola, and piano of music from Adès’ 2016 opera which made a celebrated Paris debut in January 2024. The first two draw on the melancholy duets of doomed lovers Beatriz and Eduardo; the third recalls a frightening premonition, and the last is a version of Silvia’s eerie lullaby in which she cradles a dead lamb.
In 2016 Adès was joined at the Fondation by his longstanding collaborator Kirill Gerstein at the keyboard for the French premiere of the Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face; in 2021 he returned with Pekka Kussisto for the world premiere of Märchentänze, in its original version for violin and piano.