Thin Ice (Violin Concerto No. 2)

Program notes

About the Work

Thin Ice is Ondřej Adámek’s second violin concerto, and this performance is the first in Britain. It was written for Christian Tetzlaff, who gave the premiere in Paris on 8 February 2026 with the Orchestre National de France under Cristian Măcelaru, as part of Radio France’s Festival Présences. Within weeks he had played it again in Winterthur, with the composer conducting, and in Adámek’s native Prague. The London Symphony Orchestra is one of four commissioning partners, with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Musikkollegium Winterthur and the Orchestre National de France.

Adámek’s first violin concerto, Follow Me, was composed in 2017 for Isabelle Faust and told a story without words: a leader, a crowd that repeats what the leader says, and a crowd that finally turns on its guide. The new concerto is also a drama, but an inward one. In a note published by Boosey & Hawkes the composer says it is ‘built on the contrast between raw energy and the voice of remorse, conscience, or fate’. The soloist stands for the first of these, and for most of the piece something is pushing back.

The work lasts about twenty minutes and has four movements. Adámek describes the first as music in which ‘playfulness, exuberance, and inexhaustible energy frolic freely’, a carefree dance that gradually tips into chaos and ends ‘in a plunge into the abyss’. In the second, he writes, ‘spontaneity is buried alive’: the soloist is shut in a dark, airless space where a reproachful voice alternates with urgent cries. The third movement attempts an escape in what he calls ‘a quiet, whispered dance’, and it offers only the illusion of freedom. The finale brings the carnival mood back, ‘this time almost violently’, and sets it against the weight of conscience. The title comes from his last sentence: two forces that cannot be reconciled ‘wrestle on thin ice’.

Listeners who know Adámek’s music will expect the orchestra to behave unusually. His scores are full of sounds borrowed from speech and breathing and from musical traditions far from the concert hall, and they are driven by a strong, physical sense of rhythm. The orchestra here is of ordinary symphonic size, with piano, harp and three percussionists, but several wind players double on less familiar instruments, including slide flutes, contrabass clarinet and piccolo trumpet.

What to Listen For

Because the piece is so new, the composer’s outline is the best guide, and it is worth holding on to its two characters. One is the solo violin at play: fast, restless, dancing, unable to keep still. The other is whatever interrupts it. In the finale Adámek describes ‘defiant high gestures’ colliding with ‘a deep, stern motif’, so the conflict is laid out across the full height of the orchestra, high against low.

The opening movement sets the pattern. Listen for how long the exuberance lasts before a warning note creeps in underneath it, and for the point at which enjoyment turns into something closer to frenzy.

The two middle movements are the quiet ones, and they differ in kind. The second is tense and confined, with the violin alternately pleading and pretending to submit. The third is hushed in another way, a dance kept to a whisper that is broken off again and again.

In the last movement speed and repetition take over. Adámek speaks of acceleration building ‘toward a physical struggle’, and the ending does not announce a winner.