Thomas Adès: The 2025/26 Season

Thomas Adès shares some insights into his works, programming and career ahead of his two concerts in our 2025/26 season. He will be presenting an unmissable programme of Nordic classics, collaborations with soloists Sean Shibe and Johan Dalene, as well as two of his own compositions.

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When thinking about a programme to perform with the LSO, there is the great versatility, so you have the wealth of the repertoire, and you can also program some more far-out new works together. The orchestra is very happy in both those places. Alongside brand-new or recent work, I like to remember the more recent past, and keep those pieces in play. But for me some of the most exciting traditional repertoire is Sibelius and music of that time, because it’s quite late on in the symphonic story, and connects and speaks to much more recent things directly.

I think one of the most exciting things about writing for orchestra is the fact we’ve been through a huge period of change and experimentation in the last half of the 20 century. It’s broadened the scope of what an orchestra can be so much, but the form is so resilient: it has this elasticity that means it can be moved around a lot, but then it springs back quite quickly into the core format of an orchestra. For example, the work by Alex Paxton that we are doing is so extraordinarily imaginative, and yet the orchestra he is writing for, though enhanced, is still a traditional orchestra, which means it can sit directly next to, and have a conversation with, a Sibelius symphony.

Aquifer

An aquifer is an underground conduit for water. Water finds aquifers, and it’s the closest metaphor I could find for what it is like to guide a musical impulse. It finds its ways of moving very fast and then suddenly there’s a moment, perhaps an obstacle, where it has to move more slowly, wait and look around for the next outlet.

The Origin of the Harp

The Origin of the Harp is a work that I wrote in the 90s for a unique ensemble of three clarinets, three violas, three cellos and percussion. It was quite an important piece for me because I was just figuring out my harmonic language, and the seeds of some bigger pieces are all in there, like my first opera Powder Her Face, which was the next piece I wrote. The music’s quite personal, quite undercover at times, but I’m very fond of it. I wanted for some time to make a new orchestration of it for a more traditional orchestra, as the original ensemble is quite tricky to assemble, and also I was very interested to discover how to translate the music acoustically to a traditional orchestral structure. This is the first time it’s been performed like this in England.

What’s special about the LSO? Where does one start! I was born in London, and almost all my formative musical experiences took place here. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve been to an LSO concert and being stimulated and excited. I find myself coming to more and more concerts here at the Barbican with the LSO because there’s so much variety in the in the programming. Not just the unusual works, but also the way that familiar works are presented feels very fresh, and I think that to get the balance just right has really paid off.

Being a conductor, you can be more detached and analytical about how things are working. And it has perhaps taught the composer side of me to be more specific or precise in certain ways, because I want to save time for everybody. I put in as much as I can in advance now, but I also know (as a conductor) that people are absolutely free to ignore what I suggest, and very often have better ideas than mine!

As a composer, you’re really always hoping that people will understand what you mean – and you can point to it in the score – but there always has to be an element of trust and interpretation, and that includes me conducting my own music.

I think with Sibelius – more than any other symphonic composer for me – you can really feel he’s showing his working. Particularly in the Fourth Symphony, which is the most intensely psychological. If he’s lost in the structure and can’t work out how to get from one place to another, he makes you feel lost for a long time, like wandering through caves blindfolded or swimming underwater. The Fourth is the most extraordinary, desolate work, and very moving.

The Third Symphony, on the other hand, is almost neoclassical; you could tell that he was moving away from the grand, beautiful, but rather 19th century scale of the first two symphonies and into something fresher and more direct. And then in the Sixth Symphony, he steps away from the whole thing, from the world, and it’s got this great sense of going up and seeing the world from above, from the clouds. I think it’s my favourite of the seven symphonies.