English composer, pianist and conductor Thomas Adès was BOTD in 1971. Born in London to a middle class family, he showed musical talent from an early age, studying piano and composition at the Guildhall School of Music and at King’s College at Cambridge University. He began his professional career as a concert pianist, but became well known for his compositions, including the piano piece Darknesse Visible; Five Eliot Landscapes, written for piano and soprano; the chamber piece Living Toys and the string quartet Aradiana. Much of his work reinterprets work by classical composers including Franz Schubert and François Couperin, though he also reworked Cardiac Arrest by ska band Madness for chamber ensemble. He rose to international attention with his 1995 opera Powder Her Face, dramatising the scandalous life of the Duchess of Argyle, with a sexually explicit libretto by Philip Hensher. He was widely praised for his operatic adaptation of Shakespeare‘s play The Tempest. First performed at London’s Royal Opera House in 2004, it has been frequently performed and revived. A 2014 production at the New York Metropolitan Opera, directed by Robert Lepage, won a Grammy Award for best opera recording. His other notable works include the orchestral pieces O Albion, Asyla, Tevot, Polaris and In Seven Days, his Violin Concerto, the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, and the opera The Exterminating Angel, based on Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film. In 2021, he collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor on a three-part ballet of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, performed by the English Royal Ballet. A 2022 recording by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, directed by Gustavo Dudamel, won a Grammy award for best orchestral performance. Adès also has a lustrous parallel career as a conductor, working and recording with the Boston Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw and the Gewandhaus Orchestras. Now considered one of the foremost composers of his generation, retrospectives of his work have been held in London, Paris, Stockholm and Helsinki. Openly gay since forever, he identified with closeted gay composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky in his youth, though happily grew out of the association. In 2006, he entered into a civil partnership with Israeli filmmaker Tal Rosner, with whom he lives in London.