The ‘narrative concerto’ has its roots in the early 19th century. Think Harold in Italy, Hector Berlioz’s ‘symphony with viola obbligato’, or Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, both of which cast the soloist as protagonist in a musical drama. In Follow Me, Ondřej Adámek takes this idea and adds a macabre twist. Across three movements, the soloist (‘leader’) and orchestra (her ‘followers’) act out a fizzing dialogue in which the former, having seduced and then provoked the latter, is ultimately overwhelmed – driven (literally) from the stage and ‘symbolically executed’.

If the end sounds violent, then the musical means is just as fierce. Insistent melodic fragments shared out between soloist and orchestra paint a terrifying, ritualistic picture. A battery of percussion – including whips, cymbals, flexatone, ‘lion’s roar’, gongs of various sizes and extractions and a set of 29 chromatically tuned cowbells – heighten the climaxes in the dynamic outer movements. Special or ‘extended’ techniques also reinforce Adámek’s earthy sound world. At the end of the first movement, for example, ‘breath noises’, achieved through various unorthodox means in the strings, brass and woodwind, take us from a wild outburst to a sudden sense of being ‘inside our body’, setting us up nicely for the surrealist calm of the Bach-inspired middle movement.

Exploration and manipulation of orchestral colour is a key aspect of Adámek’s style, as is the borrowing or imitation of techniques from non-Western musical cultures. As such, Follow Me opens with the soloist, unaccompanied, forming and reforming gestures with an ‘exaggerated vibrato that recalls a singer in Japanese Noh theatre’, while the responsorial sequences that follow were partly inspired by the calls of Nairobi market vendors and by katajjaq – a type of Inuit throat singing. The final-movement ‘execution’, meanwhile, echoes another of Adámek’s keen interests: imbuing concert performance with movement and gesture.

All this makes for a work that is equal parts dramatic, savage and unsettling. Still, peel back the modernist detail and Follow Me fits snugly into the traditional concerto model – one that precedes Berlioz and Weber. Its three-movement, fast–slow–fast structure has been commonplace since the beginning of the 18th century, and complex solo–orchestral dialogue is largely a legacy of Mozart. The composer bookending tonight’s concert feels particularly appropriate: Beethoven pioneered the idea of an unaccompanied solo introduction (in his Fourth Piano Concerto) and his interplay between soloist and orchestra, in particular the startling use of orchestral timbres with the solo line in his Violin Concerto, set the standard for subsequent composers, Adámek included.

Ondřej Adámek

‘I loved taking different objects – kitchen pots, glasses, toys – sorting them to create a scale and playing them together with tapes of Baroque music.’ This childhood anecdote, shared in an interview earlier this year, conjures a cheerful image of the young Ondřej Adámek. It also sums up, albeit rather crudely, his adult musical style: an emphasis on exploratory techniques and novel acoustic sounds (see his musical invention, the Airmachine), a direct and earthy intensity, a childlike delight in miscellany and a playful approach to tradition.

Born in Prague in 1979, Adámek came of age during the decline of Czechoslovak communism. He learnt to play the piano, organ, guitar and horn as a child and, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, eagerly soaked up the music of Western modernists (György Ligeti, Igor Stravinsky, George Crumb, Gérard Grisey), as well as that of nonWestern cultures. Ethnomusicology would later become a particular passion: time spent in countries from Spain to Kenya to Bali has had a strong impact on his work.

After studying music in Prague, he moved to Paris, where, at the city’s conservatory, he took courses in conducting, electroacoustics, orchestration and Indian music, absorbing the techniques and refinements of the avant-garde. Though he never rejected the French school and what he saw as its ‘emphasis on detail, sound, craft’, Adámek would ultimately develop a more pluralistic modernism, honing his style during a residency at the DAAD Artistsin-Berlin Programme. Prestigious awards and commissions would follow, and today Adámek is a sought-after talent, both as a conductor and composer.

His important works include the 2016 ‘a cappella’ opera Seven Stones, written for four soloists and a 12-person chorus ‘playing instruments and objects’, the 2020 song cycle Where Are You?, which sets Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu texts, and Let me tell you a story for voice and ensemble, which combines Korean pansori narrative devices with a storyline by Icelandic poet Sjón. All exhibit Adámek’s fascination with the human voice, especially when presented in combination with ‘gesture’, a language of movement that, he believes, enhances the power of concert performance.

Read the full programme note and profile on the London Symphony Orchestra website