Czech Philharmonic • Thomas Adès
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
Ferruccio Busoni
Tanzwalzer, Op. 53, BV 288 (12')
Pierre Boulez
Messagesquisse (7')
György Kurtág
Petite musique solennelle – En hommage à Pierre Boulez 90 (Czech premiere) (9')
Thomas Adès
Air – Homage to Sibelius for violin and orchestra (Czech premiere) (15')
— Intermission —
Thomas Adès
The Exterminating Angel Symphony (Czech premiere) (20')
Entrances
March
Berceuse
Waltzes
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
He has been concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic for more than a decade, has been performing as a soloist since the age of twelve, and also devotes himself to chamber music as a member of The Trio: the young cellist Václav Petr has established himself as one of the most successful artists of his generation.
He learned the basics of cello playing from Mirek Škampa at the Jan Neruda School in Prague, studied under Daniel Veis at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and then graduated under Michal Kaňka. He further perfected his playing under the guidance of Wolfgang Boettcher at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and participated in a number of international masterclasses in Kronberg, Hamburg, Vaduz, Bonn, and Baden-Baden. He has also achieved a remarkable number of competition successes since childhood (Prague Junior Note, International Cello Competition in Liezen, Austria, Talents of Europe, Concertino Praga) and gradually worked his way up to the most prestigious European competitions (semi-finalist in the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann competition, winner of the Prague Spring competition).
At the age of 24, he won an audition for the Czech Philharmonic, becoming one of the youngest concertmasters in the orchestra’s history. He has also performed several times as a soloist with the Czech Philharmonic, including in 2024 at the Dvořák Prague Festival, where he played the world premiere of Petr Wajsar’s Concerto for cello under the baton of Ingo Metzmacher. He has also performed as a soloist with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonia, the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra Ostrava, and the Baden-Baden Philharmonie.
Václav Petr has also enjoyed great success as a chamber musician. Between 2009 and 2020, he was a member of the Josef Suk Piano Quartet, with which he won first prizes in the chamber ensemble competition in Val Tidone, Italy, the Salieri-Zinetti chamber ensemble competition, and one of the most prestigious competitions for chamber ensembles with piano, the Premio Trio di Trieste. In 2019, together with Jiří Vodička, concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic, and pianist Martin Kasík, he founded the Czech Philharmonic Piano Trio, later renamed The Trio. In 2020, they recorded Bohuslav Martinů’s Bergerettes in period costumes and won an international competition in Vienna.
In the winter of 2026, Václav Petr performed Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano together with violinist Jan Fišer and pianist Karolina Pancernaite, accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Giovanni Antonini. Critics praised his “brightness, wonderful articulation, and silvery tone.”
Václav Petr plays a master instrument from the workshop of Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, a Teschenmacher model from 1757, on loan from a private collection.
Thomas Adès conductor
Thomas Adès was born in London to a family with Syrian-Jewish roots. His talent for both performance and composition became apparent while he was still a student—today he is recognized as a composer, conductor, and pianist, and collaborates with the world’s leading orchestras and opera houses. Between 1999 and 2008, he directed the prestigious Aldeburgh Festival.
As a conductor, he regularly performs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has also appeared with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Czech Philharmonic.
In the 2025/2026 season, he made his debut with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne. He also served as artistic director of the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and participated in the celebrations marking the centenary of the Hungarian composer György Kurtág at the Budapest Music Center.
As for opera, in addition to his own works, he has conducted The Exterminating Angel and The Tempest—which he has staged at the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera, and La Scala in Milan, among others—he has also conducted, for example, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the Zurich Opera and the Royal Opera House in London, as well as the opera Aliceʼs Adventures Under Ground by contemporary Irish composer Gerald Barry in Los Angeles and London.
He also frequently conducts his own orchestral works, for which he has received numerous awards—including, for example, Asyla (1997), Tevot (2007), Polaris (2010), the violin concerto Concentric Paths (2005), In Seven Days for piano and orchestra (2008), and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2019). In one of his interviews, he spoke about the dual role of composer and conductor and described the most exciting moment for him—when his own compositions come to life and take on a concrete form while working with an orchestra—allowing him to bring his vision as close to reality as possible.
As a pianist, he has performed in recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York and Wigmore Hall in London, and has appeared in concert with the New York Philharmonic, among others. In 2020, he released a CD dedicated to the piano works of Leoš Janáček.
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.