escenic (original) (raw)

Thomas Adès talks to Peter Culshaw about his thrilling new work and about the burden of being seen as the saviour of English music

The music of Thomas Adès seems so new, you have to find correspondingly new ways of listening to it. Certainly, coming to a stunning, complex piece such as his latest work Tevót in the normal way tends to lead to information overload. Yet it also has a warmth and equilibrium that we have rarely seen before in Adès's work.

Tevót, he says, is a word meaning both the Ark and also "bar of music" in Hebrew. "It's an incredible word. I imagined a vessel that carries people or a family through hostile waters to safety."

I went to Berlin last month to hear the première of Tevót conducted by Simon Rattle and it was clear, listening with Adès to the rehearsal, that even the Berlin Philharmonic - arguably the world's best orchestra - was challenged by the piece. But they rose to the challenge, and after the concert Adès's friend the novelist Alan Hollinghurst described Tevót as "astounding, the best thing he's ever done".

Most music critics have been hugely impressed, if occasionally left a little cold, by the sheer cleverness of Adès' music, the brilliantly original sonorities and rhythmic invention, the way it absorbs and spits out the history of music. He cannibalises and re-imagines wildly eclectic musical influences - from Ligeti to Janácek, from the Astor Piazzolla-influenced tango of his first opera Powder Her Face to his piece Brahms, which was an "anti-homage" to the composer. There was even the thump of house music in a section of his 1997 piece Asyla.

Adès tells me that Tevót is "the first piece in which I haven't been conscious of obvious influences". I ask him about the emotional warmth of the piece. "I really let this one go where it wanted to, and it went in a very surprising direction. I was shocked by the resolution, how wide open it is. In my twenties, I would have botched the end, hidden it a bit, made it ironic."

Composers of the past, I suggest, would have ascribed this feeling of music writing itself to God flowing through them. "I do think more and more it's a channelling," he says. "You absorb music and you need to conduct it like electricity on to the page."

Since his early work, starting with his Opus 1 Five Eliot Landscapes, written at the age of 18, Adès has had been fêted as the great hope of English classical music - too much, indeed, for his own comfort. These days the Royal Opera House puts on his operas (The Tempest, his most recent opera, is revived this month), and the best orchestras in the world seem to be at his disposal for new work. He is also artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival.

There are no fewer than three retrospectives running of his work this year - the Presences festival in Paris, the Ultima Festival in Oslo, and Traced Overhead at the Barbican. The last was programmed by Adès and includes work which informs his own, such as Beethoven's First Symphony and more modern works from György Kurtág, Conlon Nancarrow and Stravinsky.

Stravinsky's Les Noces is his "favourite piece in the world ever, really, and when I heard the Pokrovsky Ensemble [a choral group who have researched ancient Russian singing techniques], I knew that's what I wanted. Stravinsky would love this version." He will also play piano and conduct at the Barbican Festival; even if he had never become a composer, he could have forged a career at either of these activities.

Yet it's clear the weight of expectation on him has been a mixed blessing. "Thomas used to be quite an anguished soul," says a colleague of his. He has an uneasy relationship with the media. His publisher Sally Cavendish explains that an early interview implied unfairly that he was comparing himself to Mozart, while another opened by asking him if he was the new Britten. "Thomas just didn't know what to say, so he said nothing". About 10 years ago, the pressure got too much and he disappeared to a Greek island, cancelling a prestigious tour playing Ligeti piano music with Simon Rattle.

More than once in our interview Adès talks of "retaining your innocence" as essential to a composer. When I say he has managed not to be put in a box, he replies: "Yes, but I've had to work hard for that. When people start talking about atonal or tonal or postmodern, or whatever - I'm not being weird, but I really don t know what they are talking about."

These days, he says, "I've stopped believing in the past. You have to think of the great composers as your friends. They might be frightening friends, but still friends anyway".

Being described as the musical "messiah" (to use David Mellor's word) of English music used to annoy him a lot. "I try to tune that out. I am English, but I spend so much of my time in other places. I was always aware I had this name that was difficult to pronounce and didn't quite fit in."

So he doesn't want to become an establishment composer, with lots of BBC commissions? "I couldn't care less. I know I'm incredibly lucky, but being institutionalised is bad for an artist. They put a picture of me up in the National Portrait Gallery, and initially I thought, 'Fantastic'. But, when I saw it there, I had this surprising reaction that I'd been tricked, I'd been trapped. I thought I'd made a mistake."

Hardly any of his friends are in the music world. "I think it's great to be part of a group, like the Surrealists, but it's a very English thing to be a lone figure on the mountain top. Britten was a pretty solitary, strange figure, too."

He is known for his interest in contemporary "non-classical" music, such as house, and drum and bass. Does he still listen to them? "Oh yes. Are you kidding? I've got 2,000 things on my iPod and the only classical things are what I'm learning for conducting." So what else is on his iPod? "I like young London bands like Trash Fashion. Princess Superstar. Kate Bush is a great artist."

I tell him he was spotted at a recent concert by the harpist and singer Joanna Newsom. "Well, to some people she's like pulling teeth, but I think she's amazing."

Adès was one of the first to take advantage of the civil partnership rules to commit to his partner, the video artist Tal Rosner. Does he recommend getting hitched? "I can't recommend anything more. It's fantastic." Friends attribute some of Adès's new-found equilibrium in his life and his music to the relationship.

Does he think there is such a thing as a gay aesthetic in his music? "Well, there was in Powder Her Face [about the notorious Duchess of Argyll]. I don't know. I've thought about doing an opera with two male leads, but would that be too gay, too contrived."

Despite his reputation for being super-sensitive to criticism, Adès is open, humorous and empathetic, but also someone who will go to considerable lengths to protect his hard-won freedom as an artist.

"I can use anything I want in my music - the sound of a tram, Mahler, I don't care. It all comes through me. That's what babies are like, using DNA from a long time ago."