Described by the New York Times as ‘one of the most accomplished and complete musicians of his generation’, composer, conductor and pianist Thomas Adès has history with the Hallé. In the 1990s, as the orchestra’s Composer-in-Association, Adès was commissioned to write The Origin of the Harp (1994) and These Premises Are Alarmed—the latter celebrating the opening of Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in 1996. Several decades later, beginning in autumn 2023, Adès returned to the orchestra for two seasons as Artist-in-Residence, a relationship captured on this recording.

This album presents a survey of Adès’ own recent works for orchestra—including the first recording of Aquifer (2024)—and showcases music from Oliver Leith and William Marsey, two younger British composers who Adès has championed. Leith’s Cartoon sun was commissioned by the Hallé at Adès’ request, while Man with limp wrist was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and both works were premiered by the Hallé.

Thomas Adès (b1971) Shanty – Over the sea (2020)
This work was commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Münchener Kammerorchester, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Amsterdam Sinfonietta (supported by The Eduard van Beinum Foundation), Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Kammerorchester Basel with Gstaad Menuhin Festival & Academy, Istanbul Music Festival and Barbican Centre with Britten Sinfonia. Its world premiere performance was given by the Australian Chamber Orchestra at Wollongong Town Hall in February 2021.

A shanty is a song with many verses that is sung by a group of sailors at work. Along with any folk song in the English-language traditions, a shanty creates depth through repetition of the melody and variation of the story. The melody is sung many times, never quite the same, with a strong rhythmic pulse but not necessarily literal unanimity.

In a shanty, the cyclical verses build a story of the harsh, mechanical routine of the petty captain’s rule, and accumulate a longing for mutiny. As in a slave spiritual, there is an implied yearning for liberation, freedom from the false, arbitrary regime and a dream of a safe harbour beyond.

In this shanty, fifteen individual voices, sometimes together and sometimes divergent, create a widening seascape. Shanty is written for the musicians of the orchestras who play it.
© Thomas Adès

Thomas Adès Dawn – Chacony for orchestra at any distance (2020)
Due to the uncertainty around the number of players permitted at the time of the work’s commissioning and first performance, Dawn is designed to work with an orchestra of flexible size and with players placed around the hall in anyway. Its first performance was given by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Adès wrote Dawn for the 2020 BBC Proms—for a concert that had to be given under pandemic conditions, with the orchestral players well separated. He calls it a ‘chacony’, using Purcell’s term for a composition based on a repeating bass and more commonly known nowadays as a ‘chaconne’ or ‘passacaglia’. Beginning on middle C, the line steps mellifluously down and returns; it is a wheel revolving almost to the end, passed from harp to piano to gongs, where it settles.

With only tiny exceptions, everything could be played on the white notes of the piano, but these white notes are coloured by melodies and conversations moving through the orchestra. One might feel at the end the sun rising, but in the composer’s mind ‘the sunrise is imagined as a constant event that moves continuously around the world’.

It may be no coincidence that his mother’s first name is Dawn.
© Paul Griffiths, 2025

William Marsey (b1989) Man with limp wrist (2023)
This work was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2019. The world premiere was given by the Hallé in October 2023, conducted by Thomas Adès.

The title for this piece comes from a 2019 oil painting by Salman Toor. It’s a tall, thin canvas, a whole-body portrait of a naked man in introspection. The painting has always struck me as unusual. Toor’s work of that time usually features characters in the midst of dynamic, domestic scenes, his distinctive protagonists (ciphers for the painter himself) finding themselves in quiet moments at crowded bars, at parties with friends, enjoying quiet reveries in the glow of a smartphone. The central character of Man with limp wrist however is a single, posed figure, standing alone against a grey wall, one arm raised with a dangling hand, his gaze averted.

Toor’s style inspires the whole set as well as the eponymous final movement. The preceding seven parts of this piece concentrate on other paintings by the artist, each describing single fleeting moods or scenes, domestic settings. And as Toor references the Old Masters in his composition and subject matter, so does my music navigate historical foundations, drawing upon melodies and harmonies from centuries-old hymns, breaking down and reassembling them into fragments that repeat, meditate and unravel.

As I whittle away at these old songs to make something new, their remnants spread throughout my work in a tangled web of musical inheritance. Their rigid stanza structures collide and interfere with their new forms. In Ghost story, parts of a Bach Passion hymn drift forwards calmly before taking abrupt, startled leaps. The tune in Bar boy loops and drunkenly scrambles over its accompaniment, while Family photo weaves its disparately sourced melodies and bass lines into a new, harmonious whole.
William Marsey © 2025

Thomas Adès Tower – for Frank Gehry (2021)
Tower – for Frank Gehry is a 2-and-a-half-minute fanfare, scored for 14 trumpets. Commissioned by André Hoffmann, it was premiered in 2021 under the direction of conductor Ilan Volkov.

Written for the opening of a new artistic hub building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the Tower of the title is a stainless steel-clad cultural building, the centrepiece of the Luma Arles arts centre in Southern France. According to Gehry, the design references Arles’ Roman architecture, nearby mountains and Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which was painted nearby.

The 56-metre-high arts tower contains the exhibition galleries, archives, a library, offices, seminar rooms and a cafe. Clad with 11,000 irregularly arranged stainless steel panels, the distinctive tower was designed to become a local landmark. One of the world’s leading architects, Gehry’s is best-known for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
© Hallé Concerts Society

Oliver Leith (b1990) Cartoon sun (2024)
The world premiere performance of Cartoon sun was given by the Hallé on 6 April 2024 at The Bridgewater Hall. Following a request by Thomas Adès, the Hallé Concerts Society made the commission, with grateful thanks to CMS whose sponsorship supports new works.

Oliver Leith describes Cartoon sun: ‘Everything looks different in the sun. Here, I think of cartoonish wide crude rays with blotted edges. I think of a simplified complex thing. Involuntary feelings of jubilation—smiles you don’t want to crack—involuntary happiness of the sun and of bells—every feeling at once. Like the sun, the pealing of bells fills the air with a similar golden thickness or heaviness. Imagine being in a room with no windows and someone shooting a cannonball through the wall, a solid edged beam of gold appears through huge force. Dangerous, very present beauty and extremity. Bright twisted metal of brass and bells and strings. Large bells toll sadness and festivals, small bells buzz horses or dances. The brightest of lights and sounds. Sounds so intensely full or loud that they feel that they may punch through ears and glass but instead transcend that, go past into magical threshold. The satisfaction of hitting something brittle with a hammer and the crack never stopping. Great upsetting cracks in the ground revealing yellow smiling glee.’
Oliver Leith © 2024

Thomas Adès Aquifer (2024)
Commissioned by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks for Sir Simon Rattle’s inaugural season as Chief Conductor, with support from Carnegie Hall and the Gesellschafft der Musikfreunde in Wien, Aquifer was premiered in Munich in March 2024.

An aquifer is a geological structure which can transmit water. This work is a musical structure in one movement, requiring seven sections. In the first section, beginning with an introduction in which the material wells up from the deepest notes, the theme is presented first by the flutes and then builds to three statements in all, using more and more of the orchestra. After a breakdown, the slower second section presents the theme again but with more unstable rhythm and harmony. There follows a slow section with a crawling chromatic bass line. This culminates in an acceleration into the fast-flowing fourth section, which in turn slows to a mysterious stillness. From there the fifth section builds with all elements gradually combining towards a return to the opening material, which again breaks down to a darker slow section with dragging movement, from which the music escapes into a reprise of the fast-flowing fourth section, this time culminating in an ecstatic coda.
© Thomas Adès

Hallé Concerts Society © 2025