The figurative Phil Hale immortalized him in 2002 in an unusual pose.
Dandy look in front of an empty glass.
Pale suit and emaciated face.
His long twisted fingers and his body half lying on a club chair as worn as his eyes... Six years before the very unofficial portrait he was to make of Tony Blair at the end of his mandate, the American painter thus captured the young English composer Thomas Adès.
For eternity.
In the anguish of the empty page, when the musician had just started writing his second opera:
The Tempest
.
A little over two decades later, it is an artist who is the polar opposite of the painting kept at the National Portrait Gallery that we found last weekend at the Opéra Bastille.
Affable and jovial.
Recalling the presence at the Paris Opera of his latest opera, The Exterminating Angel, with the excitement of a child.
In a cascade of bursts of laughter.
Comparing Bastille to
“a fortress of lyrical art”
(he even renamed…
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