Adès: Life Story Op. 8b

This survey of Adès’s early works for small forces rejoices in a compositional voice of precocious assurance. His sideways look at musical techniques and human frailty consistently provokes, teases, satisfies and delights the ear. His considerable talents as a pianist are also displayed in these first recordings by a composer of and for our time.

The music of Thomas Adès taps into the spirit of our restless times with unquiet brilliance and an uncompromising vigour evident throughout this survey of works written in the 1990s. From the wild ‘orchestration’ of a Madness song (Cardiac Arrest) to his alarmingly prescient vision of a country laid waste (America), via French Baroque manners (Les Baricades Misterieuses) and a diatribe against a grand old man (Brahms), Adès is ever his own man.