Thomas Adès

See Venn & Stoecker 2021, pp. 283–298 and Venn 2014, pp. 95–97 for extensive bibliographies

Adés is the Deborah and Philip Edmundson artistic partner with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held for three years, 2018/2019, 2019/2020, and 2020/2021. The position was created specifically for him.

On 8 October 2015, Adès was elected into the Board of Directors of the European Academy of Music Theatre.

In 2009, Adès was the focus of Stockholm Concert Hall's annual Composer Festival, and in 2010 he was appointed foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

In 2007, a retrospective festival of Adès's work was presented at the Barbican Arts Centre in London and he was the focus of Radio France's annual contemporary music festival, "Présences", and Helsinki's "Musica Nova" festival. The Barbican festival, "Traced Overhead: The Musical World of Thomas Adès", included the UK premiere of a new work for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Tevot. Journalist Tom Service wrote of the piece, "Of any piece of new music I've heard at its premiere, this is one of the most immediately, richly powerful." In the spring of 2007, The Tempest returned to the Royal Opera House.

In 2006, Adès entered a civil partnership, later terminated, with Israeli filmmaker and video artist Tal Rosner.

He was resident with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during their 2005/6 and 2006/7 seasons as part of the orchestra's "On Location" series at Walt Disney Concert Hall and other locations.

In 2000, he was composer-in-residence of the Ojai Festival in California (along with Mark-Anthony Turnage), under the artistic direction of Ernest Fleischmann. While there, performances included:

Adès was the first Music Director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group from 1998 to 2000. He served as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1999 to 2008, succeeded in 2009 by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

In 1993, at age 22, Adès gave his first public piano recital in London as part of the Park Lane Group series of recitals.

Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. After attending University College School, he achieved a double starred first in 1992 at King's College, Cambridge, studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2004 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex.

He is also a pianist, having been a runner-up in the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition in 1990. EMI has released a CD of Adès as a solo performer, "Thomas Adès: Piano", and several CDs as an accompanist, frequently with Ian Bostridge, Steven Isserlis and others. As a student Adès was a percussionist, at one point playing percussion in Stravinsky's "Les noces" under Sir Simon Rattle.

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès CBE (born 1 March 1971) is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).