FUTURE PRESENCE

Thomas Ades

Composer, pianist, 28

What he’s done: This young British composer’s first opera, “Powder Her Face,” proved an immediate sensation and led to a commission for another from the Royal Opera, to help it settle into its newly renovated house in Covent Garden. He has written a symphonic piece, “Asyla,” that was just awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize--$200,000 worth of appreciation for a single composition. He has taken over as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, which was founded by Benjamin Britten, and is music director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He has had nearly all his music recorded on a series of discs released by EMI. Dubbed in Britain the nation’s next great composer, he has written original and immediate music that glitters like a sweet dream yet is just a thin line away from nightmare. And here is what Ades has not yet done: turned 30.

Outlook for 2000: Ades will be a composer in residence at the Ojai Festival, which this year is under Berlin Philharmonic music director-designate Simon Rattle’s artistic leadership. The rest is speculation. To alleviate what had apparently turned into unreasonable pressure from an adoring press, Ades has stopped talking to the media. And because he never repeats himself musically, we wait impatiently, not knowing what to expect next from this remarkable composer.

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Marino Formenti

Pianist, 34

What he’s done: One thing this Italian-born, Vienna-based new music specialist has done is to make a piano sound as if it could explode while never losing his elegant poise. Composers recognize this--the likes of Kurtag and Henze have written for him. But Formenti’s reputation remains, thus far, mostly in Europe and mostly as an ensemble performer; he has, for instance, been a regular of Gidon Kremer’s famed chamber music festival in Lockenhaus, Austria. Los Angeles caught a memorable glimpse of Formenti playing with near-demonic energy and staggering precision when he appeared with Austrian ensemble Klangforum Wien in the spring of 1998.

Outlook for 2000: Over two weeks beginning at the end of April, Formenti will offer a four-concert festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that will give a retrospective of the 20th century’s most venturesome solo piano music as it evolved in four key countries--France, Italy, Austria and America. It is a huge and quirky project. The American night alone includes Cage, Feldman, Ives and the oddball “Airplane Sonata” by George Antheil. This is just the kind of retrospective so common in the visual arts or film, but exceedingly rare in the performing arts.

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The Ahn Trio

A sister ensemble of violinist Angella, 28, and identical twins, cellist Maria and pianist Lucia, 30

What they’ve done: These Juilliard-trained Korean sisters might seem yet one more example of the “chamber chick” phenomenon--that is, liberated young women who flaunt a sexy image that doesn’t always go along with the kind of music they play (and, in the Ahns’ case, they do it tightly robed in Gaultier, Gucci and Gabbana). But unlike, say, the musically vanilla Eroica Trio, their main competition, the Ahns are exacting and exciting musicians with some interesting ideas. One is a series of concerts, “Ahnplugged,” in which the sisters play a standard repertory work but then fill in the rest of the program with hip things that seem suitable for the time and place. And that just might include music as fashionable as their clothes--Michael Nyman and John Zorn have written for them.

Outlook for 2000: The hope for the Ahns, who gad about the world giving as many as 100 concerts a year, is that they will succeed in their attempts to build new audiences. The trio is not yet a big name like the Kronos Quartet, but if the sisters’ hard work continues, and they maintain the high playing standards now making them so impressive, they just might be part of classical music’s next big boost. The Ahn Trio appears at UCLA on April 9.

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Michael Tilson Thomas

Conductor, pianist, composer, 55

What he’s done: The Michael Tilson Thomas Story is beginning to reach epic proportions. In the short version, we have a prodigiously talented Angeleno who becomes a star conductor at a tender age and then goes through a long struggle to actually reach his potential. Part of that struggle is played out with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Tilson Thomas is a principal guest conductor in the ‘80s. He hasn’t been seen in his hometown since. But after forming the admirable and successful New World Symphony (of young players) in Miami and serving as music director of the London Symphony, he has begun what is proving a historic tenure at the San Francisco Symphony. MTT (as he now likes to call himself) has, to put it simply, arrived. He has become a mature and deep conductor, leading downright great performances of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Ives and much more, and he has made the San Francisco Symphony great as well. San Francisco can be a smug city, but MTT’s presence has so genuinely vitalized its musical life as to make it the envy of the rest of America.

Outlook for 2000: Among the highlights of MTT’s upcoming San Francisco season will be the orchestra’s annual June festival, which he is turning into a millennial blowout of American music, with special emphasis on the maverick tradition (so much part of the West Coast but so often excluded from our formal concert life). Tilson Thomas will also, at very long last, return home, bringing the San Francisco Symphony to five Southland venues from Orange County to Santa Barbara, including the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (formerly known as the Music Center).