Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born in London on 1 March 1971, the son of the art historian Dawn Adès and the poet Timothy Adès; the surname is of Syrian Jewish origin. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, attended University College School, and took a double starred first at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1992, studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He was appointed Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music and given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex in 2004. He works as a conductor and pianist alongside composing.

Asyla, written for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and premiered by Simon Rattle in October 1997, won the Grawemeyer Award in 2000, making him the youngest composer to receive it; Rattle opened his tenure as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic with it on 7 September 2002. Five of his works — The Tempest, the Violin Concerto, Tevot, In Seven Days and Polaris — drew votes in Classic Voice’s 2017 poll of the finest art music written since 2000, and Dante and Aquifer followed in 2020 and 2024. The Barbican mounted a retrospective festival, Traced Overhead, in 2007, the year he was also the subject of Radio France’s Présences and Helsinki’s Musica Nova; Stockholm Concert Hall’s composer festival followed in 2009. He was made a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2010, won an Ivor Novello Award in 2023 for Növények, and received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal from Rattle at the Proms in September 2024.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ad%C3%A8s
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q439572