While London awaits the British premiere of Thomas Adès’s third opera The Exterminating Angel at the Royal Opera House next month, the Wigmore Hall consecrated a full day to his music and influences.

The evening culminated in performances of Adès’s own Concerto Conciso with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and Arcadiana, his first quartet written in 1994 evoking lost idylls. Set around these, Adès played piano works by his sometime teacher Kurtág, Officium breve and Selections from Játékok – successions of short fragments with their compelling, atomised focus on sonority. Alongside these were A Selection from Intimate Sketches and first Piano Sonata by Janáček, one of his constant favourites, showing off how Adès’s marvellously liquid touch invariably remains subservient to his rigorous mastery of structure. Concluding the first half was Gerald Barry’s Octet which sets up tensions which then explode, and for whom Adès recently conducted the UK premiere of Alice's Adventures Under Ground.