Thomas Adès at 50

Join us in a season-long celebration of one of the UK's greatest contemporary composers.
Members of our artistic family from across three continents come together to celebrate composer Thomas Adès in his 50th birthday year. But this is not a career retrospective; rather a springboard for more memorable music to come, with new commissions and premieres from Adès littered throughout the year. As far as we’re concerned, one of our greatest living composers is just getting started.
Events

The Cleveland Orchestra/Welser-Möst
Igor Levit joins one of the truly great US orchestras and Franz Welser-Möst in Mozart at his most playful, Scriabin at his most romantic, and Thomas Adès at his most thrillingly original.

Adès: The Tempest
Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera recreates Shakespeare’s enchanted isle on his own, utterly magical terms in what the New York Times called ‘one of the most inspired, audacious and personal operas in years.’

LA Phil New Music Group: Late-night Green Umbrella concert
Join us as we take the pulse of musical modernism in the UK in a free showcase of cutting-edge compositions from classical music’s coalface.

Australian Chamber Orchestra: Kreutzer Sonata
Virtuosity, intensity and emotion in the raw: masterpieces by Beethoven, Janáček and a new work by Thomas Adès show off the Australian Chamber Orchestra at their super-charged best.

LA Phil/Dudamel: Dante
Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil go to Hell and back in the first UK concert performance of Thomas Adès’s astonishing Dante – a fire-and-brimstone ballet music trilogy based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

London Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Adès: 50th Birthday Concert
In the week that he turns 50, Thomas Adès conducts his epic Totentanz – a colossal celebration of life, death and the power of the imagination.

London Symphony Orchestra/Rattle
Sir Simon Rattle launches the LSO’s new season with a celebration of British music – including Britten, Tippett and Thomas Adès, plus a world premiere from Mark-Anthony Turnage.