British composer and conductor Thomas Adès wins the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
The BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Music and Opera category went to British composer Thomas Adès (London, 1971) in its fifteenth edition. The award was given “for his original reinterpretation of the Western musical tradition in a catalogue covering all genres and for his communicative ability to connect with diverse audiences”. The jury, chaired by the Spanish conductor Pedro Halffter Caro, highlighted “the extraordinary international scope of his work, which has made him one of the most acclaimed musicians of our time”, according to the jury’s citation. The prize is endowed with 400,000 euros in each of its eight categories.
According to Victor García de Gomar, secretary of the jury and artistic director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, one of the keys to this broad connection with the audience is “his ability to combine contemporary compositional techniques with resources to return emotion and expressiveness from the stage to the auditorium. He manages to restore music to its most natural space, which is the ear, creating a perfect harmony between the ear and the mind; this is what makes his music enormously modern, through a language that connects with the affections, linking the rational with the emotional. Creating music that needs to be expressed, not just performed”. The jury in the Music and Opera category, in addition to Pedro Halffter Caro and Víctor García de Gomar, was made up of the Spanish composer Raquel García Tomás; the Italian composer Silvia Colasanti; the professor of Chamber Music at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid and founding member of the Trío Arbós Juan Carlos Garvayo Medina; the General Director of Klangforum Wien in Austria and Director of the Ferruccio Busoni-Gustav Mahler Foundation Peter Paul Kainrath; and the composer and Professor of Composition at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Gabriela Ortiz Torres.
According to the press release distributed by the BBVA Foundation, the Spanish composer Francisco Coll García is the only disciple to whom Adès has taught composition. After four years as his pupil, Coll stresses that one of the features that distinguishes his master’s work is how he achieves a balance between the intellectual part, the knowledge, and the emotional element, which is what connects with the audience. “Thomas makes his own the idea that music has to be complex to write – his is complex not only in terms of inspiration, but also technically – and easy to listen to.
Thomas Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton and completed his training with composers Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway at King’s College, Cambridge.