Ondrej Adámek signs new publishing contract with Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes welcomes Ondrej Adámek among its house composers with a new publishing agreement covering future and previously unpublished works. The collaboration is launched with the world premiere of Whence Comes the Voice? by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on 4 September, conducted by the composer.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 5 August 2022
Boosey & Hawkes welcomes Ondrej Adámek with a new publishing agreement covering future and previously unpublished works. The collaboration is launched with a concert on 4 September with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Adámek himself. The programme includes the world premiere of his latest composition Whence Comes the Voice?, commissioned by the ensemble with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for vocal soloists Shigeko Hata and Neel Kamrul.
Born in Prague in 1979, Ondrej Adámek studied composition at the local Academy of Music and at the Paris Conservatory. In 2010, as a guest of the DAAD Artists Program, he came to Berlin where he has lived ever since. During longer stays in France, Africa, Spain, Japan, India, and Italy, he immersed himself in the musical cultures of these countries; the play with language(s) also emerges in many ways as a structural element of his composing. Adámek’s works include orchestral, chamber, vocal and electroacoustic music and are characterized by directness and finely formed moments of expression with artfully composed timbres.
Always in search of sounds that go beyond the conventional orchestral apparatus, Adámek developed, through years of experimental work, the installation musical instrument ’Airmachine’. The mechanical apparatus with rubber gloves, horns, hoses, and all kinds of valves had been created for the work Körper und Seele, which was premiered in Donaueschingen in 2014 with the SWR Vokalensemble and the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under François-Xavier Roth. In the meantime, the ‘Airmachine’ has taken on a musical life of its own, and has been constantly used and developed in further compositions.
Landmarks in Adámek’s compositional career include the violin concerto Follow Me, premiered in 2017 by Isabelle Faust with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Peter Rundel and subsequently performed at the Festival Musica in Strasbourg as well as with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under Susanna Mälkki; the a cappella opera Seven Stones, first staged in 2018 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival; Alles klappt for six singers and two percussionists, premiered to great acclaim at the Munich Biennale in 2018; Man Time Stone Time, presented in Witten in 2019 with the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Michael Wendeberg and performed again at the Festival Présences with the Orchestre de Radio France under Kent Nagano; and the Sheng concerto Lost Prayer Book (2019), which toured Europe, with performances at the WDR Funkhaus Cologne, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Southbank Centre London, as well as in Leicester, Den Bosch and Amsterdam. Most recently, Adámek caused a stir with Where are you?, presented by Simon Rattle with soprano Magdalena Kožená in Munich, London, Lucerne, Berlin, Antwerp, Luxembourg, Dortmund and Bucharest, as well as with the cello concerto Illusory Parts of the Mechanism, premiered by Jean-Guihen Queyras with Ensemble Resonanz under the baton of Ondrej Adámek and performed at the Acht Brücken festival in Cologne and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
Ondrej Adámek’s works have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Prix de Bourges (IMEB, 2003), the Prix Métamorphoses (Belgium 2002, 2004), the Hungarian Radio Prize (2004), the Composer Prize of the Brandenburg Biennale (2006), the Prix Hervé-Dugardin (SACEM, 2009), the Grand Prix Tansman (Lodz 2010), the Prix George Enesco (SACEM, 2011), and the Composition Prize of the City of Stuttgart 2018. In 2014–2015 Ondrej Adámek was a fellow of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome. From September 2022 until June 2023, Ondrej Adámek is a fellow at Villa Massimo in Rome.
Please read Ondrej Adámek’s complete biography from Karsten Witt Music Management.
Frank Harders-Wuthenow, Head of Promotion & Repertoire at Boosey & Hawkes Bote & Bock, Berlin, comments: "We are extremely pleased to welcome Ondrej Adámek, one of the most versatile and interesting voices of his generation, to the ranks of our composers. Like only a few, he succeeds in merging avant-garde and experimental approaches into a tonal language of the greatest suggestive power, which fascinates and deeply touches. Adámek confronts the questions of the present and senses poetic beauty in the mysteriousness of the human, the all-too-human."
Ondrej Adámek himself states: “I am very much looking forward to working with Boosey & Hawkes. The publishing house is excellently positioned internationally and has a famous catalogue with which I feel very much at home. The Berlin team has given me a warm welcome and together we are about to embark on exciting projects.”
For further information visit:
> Ondrej Adámek at Boosey & Hawkes
> Adámek premiere with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Previously published compositions remain with Éditions Billaudot, Paris. Ondrej Adámek’s is represented by Karsten Witt Music Management.
About Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes, a Concord company, is the world’s leading publisher of contemporary classical music. Its blue chip catalogue of 20th-century masters includes Bartók, Bernstein, Britten, Copland, Prokofieff, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Strauss and Stravinsky alongside an eminent front list of composers that includes John Adams, Unsuk Chin, Anna Clyne, Brett Dean, Detlev Glanert, Osvaldo Golijov, HK Gruber, Karl Jenkins, Elena Kats-Chernin, Magnus Lindberg, James MacMillan, Steve Reich, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Eric Whitacre.
> www.boosey.com
About Concord Music Publishing
Concord Music Publishing is a global, full-service, independent music publisher offering bespoke creative support from its A&R, Synchronization and Marketing teams and diligent administration by its in-house Copyright, Licensing, Income Tracking and Royalty departments. Based in Nashville with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London and Berlin, Concord Music Publishing owns or administers more than 600,000 copyrighted musical works. Spanning nearly two centuries of song, through a vast array of genres and territories, Concord represents the world’s most celebrated songwriters, composers and lyricists.
> www.concord.com
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ENDS
Photo: Astrid Ackermann
