Ades - The Exterminating Angel Symphony, Violin Concerto
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Label: Pentatone
Cat No: PTC5187487
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 14th November 2025
Contents
Artists
Leila Josefowicz (violin)Minnesota Orchestra
Conductor
Thomas SondergardWorks
The Exterminating Angel SymphonyViolin Concerto 'Concentric Paths', op.24
Artists
Leila Josefowicz (violin)Minnesota Orchestra
Conductor
Thomas SondergardAbout
The Minnesota Orchestra and its music director Thomas Søndergård delve into the imaginative world of Thomas Adès, a singular voice in contemporary classical music. Featuring two of his most compelling orchestral works, The Exterminating Angel Symphony - a world-premiere recording - and the Violin Concerto, this album captures Adès’s uncanny ability to merge intellectual rigour with raw emotional immediacy. With orchestral textures both radiant and unsettling, Adès evokes a surreal musical landscape, brought vividly to life by Søndergård’s incisive direction and violinist Leila Josefowicz’s electrifying performance.
Highlighting two distinct sides of Adès’s artistry, cinematic drama and virtuosic intimacy, this recording explores the composer’s breadth with striking clarity. Josefowicz brings fierce expressivity and precision to the Violin Concerto, while the orchestra navigates the volatile energy of The Exterminating Angel Symphony with gripping intensity. This album also marks the PENTATONE debut of the Minnesota Orchestra, Thomas Søndergård, and Leila Josefowicz.
Highlighting two distinct sides of Adès’s artistry, cinematic drama and virtuosic intimacy, this recording explores the composer’s breadth with striking clarity. Josefowicz brings fierce expressivity and precision to the Violin Concerto, while the orchestra navigates the volatile energy of The Exterminating Angel Symphony with gripping intensity. This album also marks the PENTATONE debut of the Minnesota Orchestra, Thomas Søndergård, and Leila Josefowicz.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1The Exterminating Angel Symphony: I Entrances
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2The Exterminating Angel Symphony: II March
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3The Exterminating Angel Symphony: III Berceuse
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4The Exterminating Angel Symphony: IV Waltzes
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5Violin Concerto: I Rings
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6Violin Concerto: II Paths
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7Violin Concerto: III Rounds
Europadisc Review
Among the extensive output of British composer Thomas Adès, the 2005 Violin Concerto (originally subtitled Concentric Paths) is one of his most frequently recorded works. There are good reasons for this: at roughly 20 minutes’ duration, it is compact, with two vibrant outer movements framing a mesmerising central chaconne. There are plenty of challenges for the soloist, who has to play continuously throughout the first movement (‘Rings’), but the music itself is accessible, marrying appealing yet adventurous harmonies with ear-catching sonorities, chromatic sequences and fastidious approach to scoring and formal organisation.
Just a month after a new recording by Christian Tetzlaff on the Ondine label (coupled with Elgar’s Violin Concerto) comes another, this time with a violinist who has championed the work for some years, clocking up no fewer than sixty performances: Leila Josefowicz. She is partnered on a new all-Adès disc from Pentatone, by the Minnesota Orchestra in the first recording under their new music director, Thomas Søndergård. Taken from live performances, and recorded in immaculate sound, hers is a captivating traversal of the score, every nuance and detail of shading carefully thought through, but with the sense of involvement that only comes with a live recording.
From the opening susurration, this is a work that immediately draws the listener in, and the focused sound achieves an ideal balance between soloist and orchestra, as the aural perspectives constantly shift in a kaleidoscopic succession of textures and figurations. The hypnotic mood is punctuated with carefully deployed momentary outbursts, leading to an abrupt close. The second movement (‘Paths’) starts with baroque-like multiple-stopping (the ghost of Bach clearly lies behind this 21st-century chaconne), but at first the gestures are fragmentary, as if the soloist is trying to gain access to a musical labyrinth. Josefowicz and Søndergård present a more urgent reading of this movement than Tetzlaff and John Storgårds on the Ondine disc, giving an extra edginess to the knotty grunts that pepper the musical flow, yet by no means underselling the more reposeful moments.
The final movement (‘Rounds’) has a haunting feel, the ritualistic Stravinskyesque rhythms heard as if through a haze. The temperature gradually increases, with fractured gestures introducing a more animated feel even as the soloist advances more lyrical lines. Towards the end, the violin attempts to fly high, but is finally disrupted by interruptions from the orchestra to bring this compelling work to a brusque close. Josefowicz and the Minnesota Orchestra here achieve one of the most persuasive accounts of this concerto now committed to disc.
The coupling is equally absorbing, though very different in mood. The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020) presents music from Adès’s eponymous 2016 opera (his third work in the genre, following Powder Her Face and The Tempest), itself based on Luis Buñuel’s classic 1962 surrealist masterpiece. The first three movements see the arrival of the wealthy guests (‘Entrances’, whose constant lurching immediately introduces a woozy feeling), a tough-edged, sardonic March (complete with Boléro-like snare drum) as the partygoers search for a way out of the room to which they are inexplicably confined, and a dreamy, exquisitely scored Berceuse for the pair of doomed lovers.
The final movement (‘Waltzes’) departs from the wholesale quoting of music from the opera, introducing an unsettling, fabulous but irresistible dance that leads us falteringly but insistently onwards. Shades of Ravel’s La Valse are refracted through an ironic postmodern lens as the movement rises to a climax before giving way to sparse, angular textures and ghostly glissandi, and a final defiant tutti. Every detail of Adès’s wonderfully rich orchestration, from the battery of percussion to the most fragmentary of glassy gestures, is captured to perfection, and the work as a whole, little longer than the concerto, is an appropriately enthralling ride.
Don’t be put off by the relatively short duration: this disc is a marvellous reflection of the composer’s wonderfully varied soundworld, brilliantly performed and vividly captured in Orchestra Hall, Minnesota. The booklet notes and artists’ statements could have done with tighter editing, but these two contrasting yet complementary works are a splendidly committed addition to Adès’s ever-growing discography.
Reviews
The orchestral playing and the recorded sound are magnificent. In the album’s most spectacular track, a chain of grinding fortissimo chords march along through often surprising harmonic shifts, supported by a menacing side-drum tattoo, and the textural clarity is enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.The Times
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