THE painting of the composer Thomas Adès that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, commissioned in 2002, carries a worried expression. Perhaps it reflects the pressure of his having long been trumpeted as the next messiah of British composition.

“We never seem to get over looking for the next Benjamin Britten,” said Robert Saxton, an English composer who taught Mr. Adès at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. “It’s a stupid game. It’s an English disease that goes with the class system, and I’m not surprised that Tom has been pushed into that position.”

The excitement generated by Mr. Adès, 37, has a firm foundation. His scores reveal a disparate array of influences, as with many contemporary composers, but also a distinct and identifiable voice. His music has “the combination of cutting-edge intellectualism and an emotional connection,” in the words of the tenor Ian Bostridge, a frequent collaborator.

Mr. Adès also performs professionally as pianist and conductor. Mr. Bostridge, who created the role of Caliban in Mr. Adès’s opera “The Tempest” in 2004 at Covent Garden, said he was an “extraordinarily good” conductor on that occasion, “considering he had very little experience in the pit.” And as a pianist and chamber music partner, Mr. Bostridge said, Mr. Adès approaches a score as a composer, always seeking novel sonorities.

On Friday Mr. Adès will conduct the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group at Zankel Hall in the New York concert premiere of “The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit,” an opera by the Irish composer Gerald Barry. And on Saturday Mr. Adès will play piano and conduct the group in his own music, including “Court Studies” from “The Tempest,” in Carnegie Hall’s Making Music series, also at Zankel Hall.

Mr. Adès’s varied musical talents were apparent at an early age. Mr. Saxton recalled him as a “technically and aesthetically sophisticated” 16-year-old, who possessed “extraordinary musicianship” and “an extraordinary ability to think things through in a very mature way.” Mr. Adès, he added, was also straightforward.

“He wasn’t eccentric,” Mr. Saxton said. “He turned up on time. He chatted normally and was very modest.”

Those qualities were apparent during a recent interview, in which Mr. Adès seemed friendly and relaxed, his speech punctuated by volcanic outbursts of bellowing laughter. But Mr. Adès, who was appointed artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival at 28, in 1999, and signed an exclusive contract with EMI Classics the same year, has not been immune to the enviable pressure of being in demand.

While writing the third movement of “Asyla,” a four-movement orchestral work given its premiere by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1997, Mr. Adès had a panic attack, induced when he started breathing to the tempo of the fast rhythms he was writing.

“I was hyperventilating and thought I was having a heart attack,” he said.

The music of “Asyla,” which won the lucrative and prestigious Grawemeyer Award for composition in 2000, reflects the dual meaning of asylum as a madhouse and a place of safety. Trademark Adès touches like stratospherically high sonorities evoke the cacophonous wails of desperate inmates, and moments of sustained lyricism in the strings suggest a more restful place.

Strains of thumping house music pulse through the third movement, “Ecstasio,” in which a simmering tension eventually explodes into an ecstatic melee. In an EMI Classics DVD of a live performance of the work by the Berlin Philharmonic, Mr. Rattle seems like a shaggy-haired D.J., exhorting his tuxedo-clad clubbers to frenzied heights of illicit exuberance.

Mr. Adès’s most recent orchestral score is “Tevot,” which was given its American premiere by Mr. Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic last November at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Adès calls it one of his most “directly emotional” works.

The Hebrew word of the title can refer to a bar of music or to Noah’s ark or the cradle that carried the infant Moses. Densely scored for a vast orchestra, the score bursts with unusual timbres and sonorities, giving rise to the sensation, for the listener, of wandering through a particularly vibrant cocktail party and eavesdropping on overlapping conversations. (Mr. Adès is a fan of Conlon Nancarrow, who piled up multiple rhythms.)

The piece opens with insistent high-pitched sounds in the strings and winds, eventually punctuated by a skittish volley of colorful percussion riffs. In an extended lyrical section, a canvas of shimmering strings reaches Mahlerian intensity and expressiveness. Mr. Adès’s music is often programmed with Mahler’s; at Carnegie Hall “Tevot” was paired with “Das Lied von der Erde.”

Mr. Adès’s music often incorporates unusually high sounds, as in the Violin Concerto, written for Anthony Marwood. The vocal lines for Ariel in “The Tempest” are written in an almost cruelly high range. Other Adès trademarks include an innovative use of percussion. “Asyla,” for example, incorporates silverware and empty cans and begins, in another nod to Mahler, with the evocative sound of pealing cowbells. Mr. Adès, who studied marimba at the Guildhall, says he was always banging on pots and pans as a toddler.

His first opera, “Powder Her Face” (which caused a scandal for its vivid depiction of fellatio), received its New York premiere in 1998 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and its huge array of percussion noises and pots and pans and whistles, he said, is “almost like the result of a drunken bet.”

(Page 2 of 2)

There is a surreal tinge to much of Mr. Adès’s music, perhaps stemming from his simultaneous use of stratospheric timbres, like piercingly high winds and the top notes of a piano, and rumbling lows. His father is a linguist and translator, and his mother, Dawn Adès, an authority on Surrealist art.

“It’s the only ‘ism’ that I feel at all comfortable with,” Mr. Adès said. “Writing and playing music at all is completely surreal. You are sort of sculpting in air, which gives you complete freedom to do what you want.”

Mr. Adès was born in London, where he now lives with his civil partner, the Israeli video artist Tal Rosner. Mr. Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz at the Guildhall and in 1989 was a runner-up in the piano division of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. It was providential, he said, that he didn’t place first. Immediately afterward he began focusing on composition and completed “Five Eliot Landscapes” (Op. 1), which he described as a “lumpy early effort.”

He studied with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway at King’s College, Cambridge, where he completed his quirky, bluesy Chamber Symphony (Op. 2). The first time he conducted that kaleidoscopic and sometimes riotous work, the actual sound of it came as a complete shock, he said, adding, “To hear it in Technicolor reality was startling.”

“Five Eliot Landscapes” and the Chamber Symphony will be performed on Saturday along with the “Tempest” music and “Living Toys.” As with “Living Toys,” Mr. Adès often favors programmatic titles; others include “These Premises Are Alarmed,” applied to a particularly rambunctious work, another example of his ability to combine a seemingly endless range of beguiling sonorities.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Shall I just call it Sonata and have done with it?’ ” he said. “But then, of course, the trouble is that that can be a little bit blah. And then people are liable to say, ‘Oh, it’s Neo-Classical,’ and bang, you have a label, and that’s very damaging. It had a damaging effect on how some of Stravinsky’s greatest music was received for a long time, as people thought there was a going backward involved.”

Mr. Adès has no plans to incorporate electronics into his music, he said. “I love the idea of computer music,” he added. “I’m saying that with a half-raised eyebrow. It makes me think of cute sounds, such as when you turn on your computer, there is an F major chord. Those things are very charming in a way, but I can’t imagine being that interested in sitting and having someone press ‘play.’ ” And he shuns computer notation programs, still writing by hand and calling himself “the last of the old steam composers.”

Mr. Adès once made youthfully brash denunciations of major composers, including Britten. Now he tends to “walk the other way if I don’t like something, instead of standing on the street corner and shouting that Shostakovich is a waste of time,” he said, bursting into laughter.

Most important, Mr. Adès seems to have survived the enormous pressure of grandiose expectations and exalted comparisons.

“When you are 20,” he said, “you aren’t even sure what it means to be you, let alone someone else. Now I have my hands full being me. And I’m quite happy with that job.”