On the evidence of the last year alone, Thomas Adès's international profile, as well as his productivity, remains undiminished as he enters his sixth decade. In a concert on 6 March 2021 to mark his fiftieth birthday, he conducted Kirill Gerstein and the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of his In Seven Days and Sibelius's Sixth Symphony. Because lockdown restrictions in response to Covid-19 were still in force, the celebratory nature of the concert was necessarily muted – given behind closed doors, the players distanced – and only later uploaded to YouTube.

A range of aesthetic and technical features is explored in two of Adès's large-scale works, the operas The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, along with aspects of genre involving Stravinsky and Britten. Large-scale focus is offset by brief accounts of The Four Quarters and Dawn, considering their character in light of some recent initiatives in musicology.

Despite an ever-expanding body of literature on Adès's engagement with the music of the past, his use of traditional formal models has attracted little critical comment. That which does exist privileges the relatively straightforward surface articulation of his musical forms over more nuanced accounts. In the case of Adès's sonata forms, this has had at least two consequences for our understanding of his music: first, that too strong an emphasis on syntactical groupings occludes what is happening discursively in the music; and second, that ‘textbook’ models are not the only formal tradition with which Adès's sonata forms engage. Rather, his sonatas bear traces of a rotational model that recalls the examples of Janáček and Sibelius. This article considers how Adès's sonata forms can be constituted not as neo-classical prefabrications but, a posteriori, as a practice that emerges across his career – from the Chamber Symphony and …but all shall be well to the Piano Quintet and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – from an interaction between traditional syntactical groupings, thematic procedures and tonal plots.

This article interrogates the formal and expressive roles of the opening horn-call topic in Thomas Adès's Piano Quintet (2001). Although William Caplin describes the relationship of topics to form as ‘rather tenuous’, he notes that some topics have a ‘likely’ formal relation.1 Within this, he includes the rising horn call as an initiating function. Drawing upon Charles Jencks’ influential concept of double coding, which describes a sign's ‘attempt to communicate with both the public and a concerned minority’,2 I show how the Piano Quintet's horn-call opening satisfies, on one level, the familiar (tonal) initiating formal function that Caplin describes but, understood in the context of two significant reversals of the horn call's characteristic rising contour to descending horn fifths (the openings of Beethoven's ‘Les Adieux’ sonata and Ligeti's Horn Trio), Adès's opening can be understood as transgressive. This Janus-faced interpretation of the opening bars engages both positively and critically with these references to the past, a double-coded understanding which points to Adès's continued popularity in both academic and concert spheres.

Demonstrating an ability to both subscribe to and question aesthetic and formal conventions, the music of Thomas Adès has become synonymous with a particular brand of complexity; various multiplicities – stylistic, temporal, semantic – characterise the discourses that both pervade and surround his works. This might help explain the fractured critical response to Dawn, a ‘chacony for orchestra at any distance’, premièred at the 2020 BBC Proms: a seven-minute unfurling passacaglia of stark simplicity. Mixed reviews have presupposed rationales ranging from bold aesthetic choice to deadline-induced haste. This article considers Dawn within Adès's continuing exploration of the different formal, aesthetic and semantic roles that musical simplicity can play. Here, his previous utilisation of simplicity at points of formal crux allows a reframing of the work as a compositional response to real-world crisis that, beneath its surface, presents an intriguing affinity with – and recontextualisation of – fundamental aspects of his compositional character.

The success of Philip Venables’ opera adaptation of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is underpinned by its powerful presentation of the play's text. This is predominantly facilitated by the other musical forces present, rather than through clever text-setting alone. Venables uses an array of timbral techniques, theatrical performance directions, referential sound effects, interactions with literary devices in the text and allusions to other musical genres in the opera to support and supplement his vocal writing. This article argues that the instrumental composition in 4.48 is critical in ensuring comprehension of the libretto and that, because of his working methods, Venables’ adaptation is faithful to Kane's sensitive play.

Jane Manning's death, in March 2021, brought to an end a remarkable life and musical career, and it seems appropriate to celebrate that life with an extended tribute. TEMPO has always had a particularly close relationship with new music in Britain, where the journal is based, and Jane's work as a performer transformed the way in which musicians and audiences in Britain understood the technical and imaginative potential of new music. Her repertoire was enormous, and her interpretations of older music – Dallapiccola, Messiaen, Ravel, Webern – were wonderful, but it was as the creator of new work with living composers that she had such an extraordinary influence. What follows is an attempt to describe how that influence developed and to explain why it was so extraordinary.

The Louth Contemporary Music Society festival, based in Dundalk, only six miles from the border with Northern Ireland, is now an established presence on the contemporary music scene. Thanks to its founder, Eamonn Quinn, it attracts both local musicians and major international figures and also issues CDs. This year, the programme featured a strong Irish connection and a lot of music that is quiet, meditative and minimal. Music for guitar formed another theme, with new work by the Norwegian guitarist/composer Fredrik Rasten and the Cuban Leo Brouwer.

Jürg Frey is at the point where the premiere of his String Quartet no. 4 at the online edition of MaerzMusik this March had the feel of the release of the newest film from a cult director. For my generation, this has largely meant someone like Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers: every two to four years a new movie with sameness (recurring actors) and differences (genre) comes out, and with it a new opportunity to spend an interval of time with something carefully crafted by a unique mind with one foot in the real world and one foot out of it. We dutifully check them out, interested not just in the ‘next big thing’ but also in the moment surrounding this bit of culture.

March 2021's online MaerzMusik Festival featured a trio of events on themes of Afro-diaspora and new music: one German discussion, one English discussion and the concert ‘Afro-Modernism in Contemporary Music’, each curated by prominent American composer George Lewis. The programme of, according to the MaerzMusik website, ‘composers of the African diaspora’ was performed by Ensemble Modern, who performed the same concert in Frankfurt in November 2020. At that concert each piece was a world or German premiere, repeated for the MaerzMusik version, at which we were treated to an empty hall with a multi-HD-camera setup. It was streamed live on 24 March and available on demand for a few months following.