Aquifer for orchestra
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born March 1, 1971, in London, England, and lives there and in Los Angeles, California. Adès wrote Aquifer on a commission from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra for the first season of its music director, Simon Rattle, who led the premiere with the BRSO on March 16, 2024. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performances: February 26-28, 2026, Adès conducting.
The score of Aquifer calls for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn) 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contraforte [optionally contrabassoon]), 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B-flat (1st doubling piccolo trumpet in F), 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (6 players: crotales, glockenspiel, vibraphone, tubular bells, 2 bell plates, damaged to sound impure or doubled with plates tuned 1/20-tone distant, 4 metal bars, sizzle cymbal, hi-hat, clash cymbals, suspended cymbal, 2 cog rattles [ratchets], whip, snare drum, bass drum), harp, piano, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses; half of the double bass section requires a low B).
Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood audiences have experienced virtually the entire range of Thomas Adès’s musical activity since his conducting debut with the orchestra in 2011, especially during his tenure as the BSO’s Artistic Partner, 2018-21. The orchestra has played many of Thomas Adès’s major works with and without soloists, and his music has been featured frequently also at Tanglewood, where he has directed the Festival of Contemporary Music.
The BSO first played Adès’s music in 1999, when Jeffrey Tate led his miniature but madcap tone poem Living Toys. The orchestra has since played his symphony-like Asyla under Christoph von Dohnányi; his Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, and scenes from his opera The Tempest led by the composer in his BSO conducting debut, and his Polaris, the piano concerto In Seven Days, Three Studies from Couperin, the orchestral suite from his opera Powder Her Face, Tevot, substantial tracts of his evening-length ballet score Dante, and the brief Dawn and Shanty. The BSO commissioned or co-commissioned several Adès works, including his major Totentanz for soprano, baritone, and orchestra and his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with pianist Kirill Gerstein, both led by Adès and recorded for release by Deutsche Grammophon. The BSO also co-commissioned his Air—Homage to Sibelius for violin and orchestra for soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who gave its American premiere with the BSO under Andris Nelsons. BSO musicians and Tanglewood Fellows have performed many of Adès’s chamber musicworks, among them his song cycle Növények, which was given its American premiere by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in November 2023. Adès has performed as pianist in two-piano programs; with the Chamber Players, and with the BSO, playing not only his own music but also that of composers including Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Britten, Nancarrow, Lutosławski, and Ligeti.
In his comments on his 2024 orchestra work Aquifer, Thomas Adès characteristically describes the piece in terms of what “happens,” that is, what the piece “does,” sonically, as opposed to explaining why he chose its title and/or waxing Romantic-wise about any specific imagery he might have had in mind:
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, culminating in an ecstatic coda.
Franz Liszt would have been more loquacious in 1860; Richard Strauss or Charles Ives would have been more explicit in 1910. Specific programmatic narratives have been less the fashion in recent eras, if anything preferring simply to hint a bit before letting the listener take over, as they inevitably must.
Still…. That title, Aquifer. And in his brief description a few choice verbs and gerunds: “wells up”; “fast-flowing”; “escapes,” and a few others that tap into the dynamic energy both of music and aspects of nature.
An aquifer is a natural subterranean repository of water, which geologically can take many forms. These are not open underground pools that one could scoop up with one’s hands, but rather water absorbed in permeable rock (e.g., limestone or sandstone), sand, or gravel. The analogy here is one of directionality: water under pressure in an aquifer finds its way to the surface, sometimes tranquilly, sometimes with great force and turbulence. This idea parallels what’s required of a composer in harnessing individual voices or lines of a piece and suggesting the power that might result from the constraints of harmony and counterpoint. As Adès put it in an interview, “My understanding is that water simply looks for the channel it can use…. To me that’s what I was providing in my material.”
The relationship between music and the natural world likely predates written history, encompassing mimicry of weather, landscapes, seascapes, heavenly bodies, plants, animals, and on and on. Throughout his musical life, Thomas Adès has explored this nature/music connection not only in depicting such observable phenomena as a sunrise (in Dawn), the planets and stars, and the present aquifer, but also in contemplation on the cosmic scale, most notably via literary models. His piano concerto In Seven Days maps the Biblical Genesis story of the creation of the universe. The musical architecture in his big, three-part ballet Dante reflects a cosmology described in detail in Dante’s Commedia. That epic, with its three spiraling, circle-within-circle realms of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, seemed tailor-made to amplify Adès’s longstanding use of cyclical musical forms. (More on this topic in the note for his Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, below.) Aquifer, like the Dante ballet’s Inferno, originates underground; the parallels between Dante’s metaphorical architecture and nature’s physical phenomenon suggest Adès’s attraction to forces in a sense unknowable and unpredictable, even as the music he uses to reflect them is superlatively rigorous in its working-out.
After Aquifer’s first performances, more than one commentator mentioned symphony- like quality, or more generally a weightiness, a seriousness of purpose. Adès has only used the term “symphony” once in a title, for his 2020 The Exterminating Angel Symphony, an orchestral work derived from his third opera. He has also referred to his single- movement Polaris and Tevot as symphonies, and his four-movement Asyla comes closest to the traditional norm for the genre. In their commonalities with the genre of the symphony, Adès’s large-scale orchestral works, including now Aquifer, acknowledge his affinity for the music of the Finnish master Jean Sibelius. Sibelius’s symphonic innovations culminated in his single-movement Seventh Symphony, a work whose formal categorization still triggers debate and discussion. (Its genre was somewhat unclear in the composer’s mind, too.) The organic fluidity of change from one section to the next within Aquifer recalls in particular the evolutionary development of Sibelius’s later symphonies.
The seven-part structure Adès employs in Aquifer follows from his concern for recurrence, evolution, and contrast. The composer refers to its opening music as a “theme,” which, though it has a melodic aspect, is much more than that: it’s defined by its orchestration, its directionality (fundamentally rising), and its dynamism. The rising gesture ofthis idea is presented several times, recognizable even as its height and length vary. The strong character of this gesture lets the listener hear subsequent versions of it, even widely varying in expressive character, as having derived from that original source. Even as the piece moves from the energetic opening music to more tranquil and viscous episodes, one remains aware of a deep foundation of orchestral power.
Overall, Aquifer as a piece feels vibrant and optimistic. In keeping with this mood, Adès closes with two winks. Cheekily, it ends on a huge, cheery C-major chord—quite a shock in a symphonic work of the 21st century. Aquifer requires a big percussion section, but its timbres are fully integrated within the larger orchestra, adding nuance, color, and power. One instrument in particular, the large cog rattle (also called ratchet), has a prominent role at the end of the piece in honor of the conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Aquifer’s premiere: Simon Rattle.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
The American premiere of Aquifer was given by Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York City, on May 3, 2024.