Composer

Adam’s compositions have been performed and broadcast worldwide for over 25 years. Many of his compositions have existed at, or beyond, the vibrant edges of classical music — drawing on tango, gypsy, klezmer — and are represented on innumerable recordings. Others, like a recorder concerto written for BBC Young Musician finalist and a series of compositions for Red Priest explore interactions with early music and period instrument performance. He has also been commissioned to write for BBC drama and a track for a blockbuster film.

Recent years have seen a growing corpus of works for the classical music stage. Two violin concertos, a concerto for poet and orchestra and three string trios are being recorded for release in 2027.

Of his music, Adam says: “My classical compositions are both entirely modern and as old as the hills. They could not have been conceived without the music of the 20th/21st centuries, from Bartok to electro-pop, nor without plainsong and Elizabethan music, but also come from the same folk/music-of-the-people well-spring that inspired RVW, Copland, Kodaly, Bartok etc, in their different ways. The vibrant, irregular rhythms of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are also deeply and unavoidably embedded in my mind and are part of an ongoing conversation with the ‘straighter’ rhythms of western classical and pop music. In an attempt to characterise my music in very few words, I would say that it is direct (I don’t expect a listener to have to listen to it 50 times to understand it), could perhaps be described as über-modal (it eschews classical harmonic structures whilst extending modality into polytonalities and dissonance to give the essential push-and-pull) and is driven by a strong internal narrative — I don’t expect the listener to wait around for the story, I want them to be impelled to turn the page.”

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