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Czech Philharmonic • Thomas Adès
Rudolfinum — Dvořák Hall
1 hour 40 minutes
Price from 500 to 1650 CZK
The renowned British musician Thomas Adès has put together an evening dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Pierre Boulez’s birth. Perhaps as a tribute to Boulez, he will appear in both roles for which Boulez was known: as a composer and a conductor.
Programme
György Kurtág
Petite musique solennelle – En hommage à Pierre Boulez 90 (Czech premiere) (9')
Pierre Boulez
Messagesquisse (7')
Thomas Adès
The Exterminating Angel Symphony (Czech premiere) (15')
— Intermission —
Thomas Adès
Air – Homage to Sibelius for violin and orchestra (Czech premiere) (20')
Ferruccio Busoni
Tanzwalzer, Op. 53, BV 288 (12')
Maurice Ravel
La Valse (13')
Performers
Josef Špaček violin
Václav Petr cello
Thomas Adès conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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“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.
Performers
Josef Špaček violin, guest artist
“Working with Josef Špaček is amazing. He is a wonderful person with good heart. You can feel this in his playing, which is gracious, teeming with emotion. And his technique is marvellous. He is one of the greatest solo violinists of the present time,” says the conductor Manfred Honeck, under whom the young virtuoso has regularly given concerts, in the Czech Television documentary Devět sezón (Nine Seasons) The 2023 film provides an interesting account of Špaček’s life, also shedding light on his nine-year tenure as the Czech Philharmonic’s concert master.
Although not having been a member for several years, Josef Špaček has not ceased to collaborate with the Czech Philharmonic, pursuing numerous joint projects. And even though appearing as a soloist with celebrated orchestras worldwide and as a chamber player at the most prestigious concert venues, he continues to perform in Czech towns and remote villages.
Josef Špaček is a member of the exciting international Trio Zimbalist, giving performances all over the globe. He has regularly appeared in the Czech Republic with the cellist Tomáš Jamník and the pianist Miroslav Sekera, with whom he has created critically acclaimed albums. He has also made recordings with the Czech Philharmonic (featuring Janáček’s and Dvořák’s violin concertos, and Suk’s Fantasy), the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Petr Popelka (Bohuslav Martinů’s music).
Born in 1986 in Třebíč, Bohemia, Josef Špaček showed his exceptional talent at an early age. Music was a natural part of his childhood (his father has been a cellist of the Czech Philharmonic for over three decades, and his siblings played instruments too), as described by his mother in the book Špačci ve fraku. After graduating from the Prague Conservatory
(under the tutelage of Jaroslav Foltýn), Josef went on to study in the USA, where he attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (his teachers included Ida Kavafian and Jaime Laredo) and The Julliard School in New York (tutored by Itzak Perlman).
After completing his formal education, he returned to his homeland, where he was named the youngest ever concert master of the Czech Philharmonic. At the same time, he performed as a soloist and chamber player, garnering international recognition. A watershed in his career was victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, whereupon he began receiving invitations from the world’s most renowned institutions. Due to his having an ever more challenging and busy schedule as a musician – and to his family situation, especially following the birth of three children – he resigned from the post of concert master of the Czech Philharmonic so as to focus solely on being a soloist. Owing to his immense talent and great diligence, his childhood dream to become a famous violinist has come to pass.
Václav Petr cello
One of the finest Czech cellists, Václav Petr has served as concert master of the Czech Philharmonic cello section for over a decade. He has performed as a soloist since the age of 12. As a member of The Trio, he has also devoted to chamber music.
Václav Petr learned the rudiments of viola playing at the Jan Neruda School in Prague from Mirko Škampa and subsequently continued to study the instrument at the Academy of Performing Arts in the class of Daniel Veis, graduating under the guidance of Michal Kaňka. He further honed his skills at the Universität der Künste in Berlin under the tutelage of Wolfgang Boettcher, and also at international masterclasses (in Kronberg, Hamburg, Vaduz, Bonn and Baden-Baden). He has garnered a number of accolades, initially as a child (Prague Junior Note, International Cello Competition in Liezen, Talents of Europe) and then in Europe’s most prestigious contests (semi-final at the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann, victory at the Prague Spring Competition).
At the age of 24, after winning the audition, he became one of the youngest concert masters in the Czech Philharmonic’s history. As a soloist, he has performed with the Czech Philharmonic, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava and the Philharmonie Baden-Baden.
Václav Petr has made a name for himself as a chamber player too. Between 2009 and 2020, he was a member of the Josef Suk Piano Quartet, with whom he received first prizes at the competitions in Val Tidone and Verona (Salieri-Zinetti), as well as at the highly prestigious Premio Trio di Trieste. In 2019, he, the violinist and concert master Jiří Vodička, and the pianist Martin Kasík formed the Czech Philharmonic Piano Trio, later renamed The Trio. During the Covid pandemic, they made a recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s Bergerettes (clad in period costumes), which would earn them victory at an international competition in Vienna.
Thomas Adès conductor
Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. Renowned as both composer and performer, he works regularly with the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies and festivals. His compositions include three operas : the most recent of which The Exterminating Angel premiered at the 2016 Salzburg Festival and subsequently has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Royal Opera House, London all conducted by the composer; The Tempest (Royal Opera House and Metropolitan Opera); and Powder Her Face. His orchestral works include Asyla (CBSO, 1997), Tevot (Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, 2007), Polaris (New World Symphony, Miami 2011), Violin Concerto Concentric Paths (Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, 2005), In Seven Days (Piano concerto with moving image – LA Philharmonic and RFH London 2008), Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra (BBC Proms, 2013), and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Boston Symphony Orchestra, 2019). His compositions also include numerous celebrated chamber and solo works.
Thomas Adès has been an Artistic Partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2016 and will conduct the orchestra in Boston and at Tanglewood, perform chamber music with the orchestra players, and lead the summer Festival of Contemporary Music. He coaches Piano and Chamber Music annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
As a conductor, Thomas appears regularly with the Los Angeles, San Francisco and London Philharmonic orchestras, the Boston, London, BBC and City of Birmingham, Symphony orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouworkest, Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Czech Philharmonic. In opera, in addition to The Exterminating Angel, he has conducted The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Opera House and the Zürich Opera, The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera, and Gerald Barry’s latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in Los Angeles (world premiere) and in London (European premiere). In the 2019–20 season Thomas has a residency with the Royal Concertgebouworkest and also conducts the London and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestras and makes his debut with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the USA, he returns to the Los Angeles and Boston Symphony Orchestras. Thomas also returns to the Royal Opera House twice this season, to conduct Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and the premiere of his new ballet The Dante Project.
His piano engagements include solo recitals at Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium), New York and the Wigmore Hall in London, and concerto appearances with the New York Philharmonic. This season will see the release of his album of solo piano music by Janacek and he will also join Simon Keenlyside in a recital of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Vienna State Opera.
His many awards include the Grawemeyer Award for Asyla (1999); Royal Philharmonic Society large-scale composition awards for Asyla, The Tempest and Tevot; and Ernst von Siemens Composers' prize for Arcadiana; British Composer Award for The Four Quarters. His CD recording of The Tempest from the Royal Opera House (EMI) won the Contemporary category of the 2010 Gramophone Awards; his DVD of the production from the Metropolitan Opera was awarded the Diapason d'Or de l'année (2013), Best Opera recording (2014 Grammy Awards) and Music DVD Recording of the Year (2014 ECHO Klassik Awards); and The Exterminating Angel won the World Premiere of the Year at the International Opera Awards (2017). In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Léonie Sonning Music Prize and in Spring 2020 he will receive the Toru Takemitsu composition award at Tokyo Opera City where he will conduct a concert of his own music.
Compositions
Ferruccio Busoni
Tanzwalzer, op. 53, BV 288
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) was one of the most interesting composers at the turn of the century. From his parents, both musicians, he inherited both talent and the traditions of two musical superpowers—Italy and Germany. The merging of two cultures, as well as the era in which he lived—a time of immense social, political, and cultural dynamism—had a major influence on Busoni’s distinctive musical language. Romanticism reached its peak during his youth, then it was supplanted by modernism. Composers were seeking new compositional approaches, sonic possibilities, and a new meaning for the arts marked by the disillusionment of the new century’s dawn and the First World War. Tanzwalzer served Busoni as a study for a ballet scene from what is seemingly his most famous work, the unfinished opera Doktor Faust. On the one hand, the composition is a tribute to Viennese waltzes and to the most famous composer of such dances, Joseph Strauss, but its apparent lightness and dance-like elegance are not mere stylization or parody. Busoni instead offers an ironic yet contemplative reflection on a tradition that he did not, in principle, reject, but understood as an evolving living organism from which new paths of music emerge.
Pierre Boulez
Messagesquisse
György Kurtág
Petite musique solennelle – En hommage à Pierre Boulez 90
The British conductor and composer Thomas Adès has conceived the programme of today’s concert as an overview of the evolution of classical music during the past century. Some of the chosen compositions have in common the motif of “dedication” or “homage”. A second thread running through the programme is three-four time, but we will return to that shortly.
Pierre Boulez Day—that was the name of one of the programs that the Lucerne Festival organized in the summer 2015 to honour the jubilarian and founder of its Festival Academy. One well-wisher who contributed a new composition was Boulez’s contemporary, just one year younger, György Kurtág (*1926). In 1957, when Kurtág arrived in Paris on scholarship for a year-long study visit, he greatly desired to meet Boulez, who was by then already a respected figure of French contemporary music. The two men did not meet, however, because Kurtág did not regard any compositions he had yet written as worthy of presenting to Boulez. The person the 30-year-old composer did meet was the psychologist Marianne Stein. Her suggestion to Kurtág was that he specialise in small forms, whereby he could gain confidence. Upon returning to Budapest, the first work he composed was his String Quartet No. 1, which he dedicated to Stein, and which gives sound and silence equally important roles. During his remarkably long career (which still continues), Kurtág has truly earned the reputation of a master of miniatures. As he himself puts it, he wants to “express something as intensely as possible in as few notes as possible”. The two composers finally did meet, treating each other with mutual respect. At the turn of the millennium they also worked together with the Ensemble intercontemporaine, which Boulez founded in the mid-1970s. Boulez especially admired Kurtág’s “lavish abundance of musical ideas”. And that is just what Petite musique solennelle (Little Solemn Music) is like. After its premiere, the reviewer for the British newspaper The Guardian wrote: “The ‘solemnness’ of Kurtág’s music sounds, I think, like a memorial. It’s a tribute from one composer in the twilight of his years to another, commemorating their shared history and friendship.”
Thomas Adès
The Exterminating Angel Symphony & Air – Homage to Sibelius
Thomas Adès (*1971), a native of London, is one of the most important representatives of the present generation of composers and conductors. His music brings together the order and control of the modernist tradition with imagination, and he has a feel for intellectual precision and immediate expression of emotion. As a conductor, he does not limit himself to new music, but at the same time it is seldom absent from his programmes. The list of Adès’s works that return regularly to the stages of the world’s leading orchestras would be long and would cover a diversity of genres. He has also enjoyed success as an opera composer—his most recent opera, The Exterminating Angel, was premiered in 2016 at the Salzburg Festival, and since then it has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, London’s Royal Opera in Covent Garden, and in 2024 at the Opéra Bastille in Paris.
Later, Adès slightly revised the musical material of the work, and in 2020 he introduced it on concert stages as The Exterminating Angel Symphony. The plot of the opera and of the symphonic version is drawn from Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealistic film with the same title, in which a group of people discover after a dinner party that they cannot leave. The four-movement composition begins with the ceremonial entrance of the guests, then it continues with manic marches and a dark Berceuse (Lullaby), and it culminates with the grotesque whirling of waltzes. “What interests me about the waltz is the seductiveness of this music. I often feel that the waltzes by Johann Strauss are saying: ‘Why don’t you stay a little longer? Don’t worry about what’s going on outside’”, said Adès in an interview before the opera’s premiere. “So in the context of our opera the waltz becomes very dangerous, potentially fatal.”
The dramatic symphony is followed by Air – Homage to Sibelius (2022). The piece’s title refers to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose music Adès admires for its ability to develop a single idea into a monumental form and to create room for an almost meditative feeling of calm. The Air grows from a single melodic flow that gradually expands between the solo violin and the orchestra like an endless canon. The colour of the orchestra is transparent and constantly changing, filled with subtle allusions to the Nordic landscape and faint reverberations of Sibelius’s aesthetic. Contemplative and yet restless, the music is driven by an inner tension that never completely dissipates.
Maurice Ravel
La Valse
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) also took inspiration from the phenomenon of the Viennese waltz. In its embryonic form, the composition was originally to have been simply titled Wien (Vienna) when Ravel began work on it in 1907. Ravel never actually visited the Austrian capital, but he felt as if he knew the place through the city’s music and its composers, from Schubert to the Strauss family. He conceived the composition as a symphonic depiction of a splendid Viennese ball of the 19th century, and he added the following preface to the score: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth… Set in an imperial court, about 1855.” With the onset of the First World War, he set the score aside, then he finally returned to it at the suggestion of Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the legendary Ballets Russes, who commissioned new ballet music from Ravel. Ultimately, the work was titled La valse, and Ravel presented it to Diaghilev in a version for two pianos in the spring of 1920. The famous impresario admired the composition, but he rejected it as a ballet. Ravel orchestrated the work nonetheless, and the premiere that December was a phenomenal success. Rather than a nostalgic miniature, La Valse is a sophisticatedly structured musical vision—in the course of the composition, the world of the waltz shines with dazzling brilliance, and at the conclusion it disintegrates into mysterious whirling. Although Ravel denied that the finale had a programmatic basis, many listeners hear in it the symbolic end of the idyllic pre-war era.