Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Thomas Adès

“Writing an opera is a bit like pregnancy. It is exhausting. Really, it’s like a black hole, it pulls everything into it, it just sucks everything in. For the spectator, the experience of an opera should be the discovery of a whole universe.”
– Thomas Adès

The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès regards composing an opera as a process that cannot be rushed, so he thinks the three he has so far written is a good number. His first opera Powder her Face (1995) secured him a place among today’s musical elite. Besides symphonic works and chamber music, there followed the operas The Tempest (2004) and Exterminating Angel (2016), which he is performing with the Czech Philharmonic in a concert version.

The opera is a musical setting of Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of guests try in vain to leave a party. Adès, the son of Dawn Adès, an expert on surrealism, calls the traditional understanding of the film as surrealism a misinterpretation: “Actually, it’s completely realistic. To me, the question Buñuel is asking isn’t ‘Why don’t they leave?’ but ‘Why do they want to leave?’ What is it that makes any of us want to do anything, change anything, go from one room into another?” When that urge is frozen, the Exterminating Angel comes.

“My work is often the result of a process of subtraction rather than addition. It was the same with composing The Exterminating Angel. When I started writing, I took as wide a swing as I could to map out exactly what I was dealing with, and then I condensed it as much as possible.”

For audiences at the Rudolfinum, this is not the first encounter with Adès, who describes composing as a process of organising chaos. In 2018, he came here to lead the Czech Philharmonic in a performance of his Totentanz (Dance of Death) and of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, known as the “Farewell Symphony”.

Once again, Adès is not coming just to do his own music. His Dvořák Hall programme is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Pierre Boulez’s birth. Like Adès, that French representative of serialism both composed and conducted. In his Messagesquisse we will here the soloist Václav Petr with six more cellists. Boulez was not the composer of the first work on the programme, but György Kurtág dedicated it to him as a sign of respect. And it was under Kurtág that Thomas Adès studied piano in Hungary.

But that is not the end of connections in the music world. Adès gave his composition for violin and orchestra the title Homage to Sibelius. Jean Sibelius greatly admired his teacher Ferruccio Busoni, who in turn dedicated the composition Tanzwalzer to Johann Strauss. At the conclusion, we return to the waltz with Adès’s favourite composition by Maurice Ravel.