Soloist, Step Forward—Thomas Adès’ Violin Concerto Gives the Instrument Something Colorful to Say

By Brian Wise | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings

Leila Josefowicz had a digital-age epiphany when she received a handwritten copy of the score to Thomas Adès’ Violin Concerto, soon after its premiere in 2005. “It was so fascinating to see the care, elegance, and clarity of his handwriting,” she recalls. “I’m missing that so much now with Sibelius [the software] and different computer formats. You don’t see so much of the composer’s personality through their writing. In any case, I just fell in love with the piece immediately.

“It was almost like an infatuation, a crush. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—and I was daunted by the challenges the piece posed.”

The industrious Josefowicz estimates that she has since played Adès’ concerto “hundreds of times” and, still obsessed, she has finally recorded it with the Minnesota Orchestra, led by its music director, Thomas Søndergård. The album, released in November on Pentatone, also features the premiere recording of Adès’ The Exterminating Angel symphony, a four-movement distillation of his celebrated 2016 opera. The composer’s charmingly old-school notation methods aside, the two pieces take listeners deep into his postmodern sensibility, with its lyrically sumptuous melodies and visceral, high-wire thorniness.

Adès is one of the few British composers to have achieved a steady presence in North American concert halls, yet this was an unusual album in certain respects. It is not a typical getting-to-know-you sampler by a music director relatively new to a city (2025–26 marks Søndergård’s third season in Minneapolis). Nor does it reflect his Danish nationality. Nor is it a pet project. And it is the latest of several recordings of this violin concerto, including a 2025 release with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and BBC Philharmonic led by John Storgårds.

Still, both Josefowicz and Søndergård believe the time feels right to delve into the kaleidoscopic catalog of Adès, who, at 54, seems more productive than ever.

It really is a violin concerto,” says Søndergård, referring to the way Adès pits soloist against orchestra. All too often, he says, “It seems like a composer hardly has any idea of why the violin should be out in front. But it’s not like that with Tom. He’s a theater man, and he knows exactly how the voice of the violin needs to step forward and then, what it wants to say.”

Søndergård first met Adès in 2005 when conducting a Copenhagen production of The Tempest, the composer’s second opera, whose helium-high vocal lines evoke the tessituras of the Violin Concerto. This is, however, not the concerto’s only challenge. Not only is the violin writing is the violin writing stratospheric, it’s also nearly constant. “This piece is extremely dramatic,” says Josefowicz. “It’s got incredible colors. It has long melodic lines. It’s got a lot of nods to the past, including Renaissance music. At the same time, it’s fully contemporary in the sense of new colors that you’ve never heard before.” 

The Violin Concerto, subtitled Concentric Paths, is in three movements (“Rings,” “Paths,” “Rounds”), each built on various formal patterns—a 12-tone row, a Fibonacci sequence, and in the second movement, a Baroque-style chaconne. At the same time, Adès writes the solo part so as to give it a semblance of rubato, of flexibility, in its phrasing.

“There are many different kinds of rhythm and speed going on at the same time in this piece,” says Josefowicz. “Tom gets a certain feeling of freedom while still notating exactly the timings of what he’d like to happen when. So, I must get beyond the intellectual exercise of understanding the rhythmic structure of all of this and get to the heart of the melodic feeling.” 

Being a Good Sport 

At times, Adès seems to have a model in the textures of György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, which Josefowicz is currently studying. “In the last movement, there’s this section where you have the same melody between me and the piccolo that’s happening at the same time, but at different speeds,” she says of the Adès. “I’m twice as slow as the piccolo.” Such techniques should not play out like an academic challenge, but serve a larger purpose, from the “carnal rhythmic beating” of the chaconne to the Stravinskyian dance rhythms of the third movement.

Though reviewers have been strongly positive, at least one early critique, from the Atlanta-based website ArtsATL, called the concerto, “in many ways, a thankless piece.” The review suggested that “some of the hardest riffs are played at relatively low volume, and [Josefowicz] never gets a big, wild cadenza.” Josefowicz shrugs off such complaints. “I’m definitely playing with the extremes of range,” she says. “It’s something that [Adès] has done quite a lot in his writing. As a player, you must be a good sport and be ready to take on these challenges to enjoy producing this music to the max in terms of expressivity. Yes, some of it is uncomfortable, and it’s meant to be.”

In performances together in Minneapolis and Birmingham, UK, Søndergård and Josefowicz honed their interpretive sympathies. “Leila and I really found each other musically,” Søndergård says. “She’s just so deep into it and knows it down to the detail. It takes a good brain and a conductor that doesn’t disturb how she reads the rubato in this music. She plays it as if she’s inventing it in the moment, but she still has that extra layer to it: She knows exactly where the turning points are harmonically and where she needs to be.” 

A Bittersweet Symphony 

The album also provides a window into the evolution of Adès’ style, from the early concerto to The Exterminating Angel symphony, completed in 2020 and based on his operatic adaptation of the 1962 film of the same name by Mexican director Luis Buñuel. The symphony has a whimsical, dance-fueled air, with hints of Ravel’s Bolero and La Valse.

Søndergård admits that he has mixed feelings about symphonic distillations of operas, referring to an arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle, “where after a few hours of rehearsal, I just missed the voices,” he says. “That said, I still think it’s very relevant to do these suites that the composers find interesting. He’s chosen some really great passages [from the opera].” For Adès, the opera symphony also allows him to get more mileage from his material without the financial hurdles of a staged production (John Adams has taken a similar route with his Doctor Atomic symphony).

While Søndergård’s exposure to Adès’ music was helped by a 15-plus-year career career in the UK—including conducting posts at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra—in Minnesota, he is pivoting toward music of the US and his Danish heritage. This January, Søndergård presides over his second Nordic Soundscapes festival, a two-week focus that celebrates the Scandinavian culture that is so deeply rooted in Minneapolis. On tap are two pieces by Sibelius—a favorite of Søndergård’s Finnish predecessor Osmo Vänskä—along with music by Abrahamsen, Stenhammar, Salonen, and Nielsen.

“It’s what I think the audience would love to hear, what they are keen and curious about,” Søndergård says matter of factly. “I don’t know how many times from these last few years I’ve said, ‘Let’s look at what [audiences] haven’t heard, and what the orchestra hasn’t played.’ If too many pieces are repeated too often, we don’t remind ourselves of that sparkle: Why are we musicians, why did we become musicians to begin with? We are curious, and we still want to be when we are 50, 60, or 70.”

On the topic of Nordic music, I ask Josefowicz whether she’s looked at Adès’ latest piece for violin and orchestra, Air, which Anne-Sophie Mutter premiered in 2022, and which pays tribute to Sibelius.

“It’s a whole different beast. It’s much, much shorter, and it has to be programmed with some other things,” she says. “It doesn’t have this mega presence that the [Violin Concerto] does. The concerto is a piece that, in some ways, you couldn’t match. It expresses so much, and it’s so dense in a certain way. It would be hard to do another one in that mode.”