Score on special sale from the Hire Library

A set of five variations on the Ladino folk tune Lavaba la blanca niña, Thomas Adès’s Blanca Variations were commissioned by the 2016 Clara Haskil International Piano Competition. The Variations appear in Act I of The Exterminating Angel, Adès’s opera based on the film by Luis Buñuel, where they are performed by Blanca Delgado, a famous pianist who is one of a number of guests invited to an exclusive dinner after a night at the opera, but who later become unable to leave. In an interview for the Salzburg Festival, where the opera premiered, Adès described the folk tune as displaying ‘an unassuageable harmonic structure very typical of longing and bereavement.’