Thomas Adès

Britain's foremost living composer, and one of the most commanding – and communicative – presences in 21st-century music, Thomas Adès had his first major success with his Chamber Symphony (1990) while still a student at Cambridge University. His first large-scale orchestral work – the rave-influenced symphonic poem Asyla (1997) – and his first opera, the sexually-explicit satire Powder Her Face (1995), attracted parallels (keenly rebuffed by Adès) with the young Britten and established Adès as a uniquely original and daring contemporary voice. His subsequent full-scale operas, The Tempest (2003) and The Exterminating Angel (2016), attracted global attention (and performances at Salzburg Festival, London's Royal Opera House and New York Metropolitan Opera). Alongside those works, Adès has composed such brilliantly virtuosic orchestral scores as Tevot (2007) and Polaris (2010) and worked on an increasingly large canvas in two piano concertos (2008 and 2018), the Mahler-inspired symphonic song cycle Totentanz (2013) and the full-length ballet Dante (2020), as well as the film score Colette (2018). Adès performs frequently as both conductor and pianist and has seen his earlier works – such as the string quartet Arcadiana (1994) and the playful Three Couperin Studies (2006) – become classics in his own lifetime.