Thomas Adès conducts Stravinsky

In his colourful music, the English composer–conductor Thomas Adès intertwines sounds from the past and present in a virtuoso manner. Adès gave a particularly strong first performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra as a conductor in 2011, followed by collaborations in 2016 and 2019. Now he returns for the Dutch premiere of his own Piano Concerto, a crazy ride full of unexpected turns, composed with Kirill Gerstein’s incredible virtuosity in mind. The soloist is also performing a special version of Liszt’s Totentanz, extended with material by Liszt himself. 

Thomas Adès opens the concert with Veronika Krausas’s baroque Caryatids and concludes with the Symphony in Three Movements from 1945, in which Stravinsky, who had emigrated to America, incorporates various ideas for failed film music projects. The turbulent symphony is a reflection on the Second World War inspired by television and documentary footage – soldiers marching, people ensuring the enemy would not be able to cross their fields, the allied advance… ‘Each episode in the Symphony is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of the war.’