Meadowlark Lemons.

11th April 2011

Post with 18 notes

Aspects of Adès I

It’s hard to write about Thomas Adès without resorting to clichés and superlatives. You can find both in the first thing I ever wrote about him, almost 6 years ago. I was 19 years old. I’m now 25, and thus better, wiser, deader. The clichés are annoying but difficult to avoid. Almost every article is sure to mention his A) past status as controversial wunderkind, B) remarkable skills as a pianist and conductor, C) the clubby third movement of Asyla/fellatio aria from Powder Her Face, D) his bass voice. Oh, and here’s another: he rarely gives interviews. I’ve read that in about 30 articles that feature an interview with him.  

I’m afraid I can’t avoid the shameless gushing, however.  There is no other contemporary composer who writes music as emotionally and intellectually satisfying as Thomas Adès. His music exhilarates the brain and breaks the heart. The semi-recent Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) is case in point: a startling combination of cerebral, Ligeti-esque playfulness and High-Romantic seriousness. Adès describes the incredible opening movement, “Rings,” as “sheets of unstable harmony in different orbits.” I like Thomas May’s description most of all: “an impatient perpetuum mobile against a wavering background of harmonically shifting sands […]the effect is at times of an uneasy, slow-motion fall through gravity-less space.”  

The second movement (“Paths”) forms the dark heart of the piece, an enormous chaconne which the composer describes as “two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution.” (This again sounds at first like a purely technical explanation of the piece’s construction, but note the emotionally-charged adjectives.) What happened to that “ironic post-modernist”? This is grand, tragic music.  In this movement the violin is like a bird flapping against a the bars of a giant cage (those menacing, violently clashing cycles which slowly spin and churn around it)—the cage eventually crushes the bird, to be sure, but not before a final flight: a beautiful, defiant melody which climbs higher and higher towards the resolution that never comes. At the end it takes its tragic fall into the bowels of the orchestra, where it’s torn to pieces by grinding machinery. The whole movement seems to be a musical depiction of the famous diary entry of Franz Kafka: ”The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demonic or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner.”  

Thomas Adès is clearly some sort of freak: brilliant, stylish composer, a virtuoso pianist, an intelligent conductor (cliché!). When you put Concentric Paths alongside his other recent work (Piano Quintet, The Tempest, Tevot, In Seven Days) and compare it to his fantastic earlier music (Arcadiana, Powder Her Face, Asyla, America: A Prophecy) you’re forced to come to a frightening conclusion: he’s only getting better. He’s like some radioactive Gamera growing larger and deadlier every day.  Clearly he must be stopped.  

The LA Philharmonic’s recent Aspects of Adès festival highlighted these freakish abilities; I resisted the urge to stop him several times during the two evenings I was there, though my blow dart was always at hand. The four programs matched Adès own music with composers who have inspired him, dead (Stravinsky, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Messiaen), and alive (premieres by zany Irish master Gerald Barry and the young Spaniard Francisco Coll, who studied privately with Adès).

The opening concert paired him with The Nose™, Igor Fyodorovich, whose own two masterpieces formed an interesting juxtaposition: the cubist Beethoven and Haydn of the neo-classical Concerto for Two Pianos rubbing elbows with the ecstatic, sweaty Russian peasants of Les Noces. The former was handled ably by Katia and Marielle Labèque, a formidable duo of French sisters doin’ it for themselves. It was a revelatory performance for those of us who have been stuck with Stravinsky’s own problematic recording (hiss and all); the Labèques relished every spiky cross-accent and faux-galant trill, and Stravinsky’s inimitably-spaced chords glowed under the intricate trellis-work of interlocking rhythms.  

The sisters returned to the stage for Les Noces along with Nicholas Hodges and Gregory de Turck rounding out the piano quartet,  Sō Percussion manning the…percussion, and most interestingly, the Pokovsky Ensemble, an honest-to-goodness group of Russian folk singers, dressed in honest-to-goodness folk garb to boot. Adès has conducted Les Noces with this group before, and the Pokovskys sing the piece from memory. The instrumentalists were spot-on and Adès’ conducting was fine and dandy, but the ensemble was too small to compete with the mechanical beast behind them, and the singing was drowned out for long stretches. The quietness of their voices could just as well be due to the shitty cheap seats I bought behind the stage: I went with my girlfriend, and I know how to treat a lady (as she discovered for herself yet again after the concert when I bought us Arby’s). The Pokovskys certainly bring an earthy authenticity to the work, but the question is: does Les Noces require “authenticity”? When the Pokovskys stray from the score to emphasize the husky chants and lamenting yelps, I think they sacrifice some of the razor-sharp precision that makes this work so brutally effective and hypnotic.

The high-point of the evening, however, was Adès In Seven Days, a concerto for piano and orchestra with video accompaniment in the form of hypnotically spinning mandalas courtesy of Tal Rosner, Adès’ Israeli-born domestic partner. Adès and Rosner have taken on the grand task of depicting the first 7 days of creation as described in the Hebrew Bible. They’re the sort of ambitious gay couple that make Republican congressmen very nervous-messin’ with the Book of Genesis, no less!-and make me glad to be alive. I myself loved Rosner’s projections, but I’m only qualified to judge the music. Although I’m now being told that I am not qualified to judge the music, I will still say that this is a major work, and one that has a long future ahead of it. Large pockets of the audience seems to have agreed, and gave standing ovations for Adès and the piano soloist, Nicholas Hodges.

When other composers represent the primordial chaos, they usually go one of a few routes: drones and fifths in the bass emerging out of silence (Rhinegold, Bruckner, Beethoven’s Ninth), a polyrhythmic jungle, a crushing 12-note dissonance. In Seven Days opens with an audacious representation of chaos: a jaunty, syncopated figure which passes from violins, to violas, to cellos and to basses.The music gains momentum with each repetition as the figure continually copies a slightly out-of-sync version of itself across each section of the strings like wriggling strands of DNA; the harmonic language and funky syncopation is Stravinskian, but the way the each string part smears with another brings to mind Reich’s phasing technique (In Seven Days, conduced by Adès and with Hodges on piano recently shared bills with Tehillim and Music For 18 Musicians, programs for the gods).

DNA is an apt metaphor. The piece is essentially a large set of variations based on a series of chords made up of the building blocks of this opening figure. Adès is ingenious in disguising these building blocks through all their subtle mutations and metamorphoses: light, darkness, separatation of sea and sky, land, grasses/flowers, trees, stars, sun, moon, sea creatures, birds/dinosaurs, Barack Obama, the summit of all creation.

The score has Thomas Adès’ name at the top of the page, so of course the orchestration is incredible. Everyone will have their own favorite pages and sections: I’m especially fond of the all-too-brief, inexplicable polymetric rhumba (complete with claves and cabasa) in the “Light” section. The piano writing is insanely difficult, and like much of Adès music favors extreme registers, the lowest of the low at the start of the “Trees” segment  (the music eventually blooms an impressive canopy), and the highest of the the high in the  “Stars/Sun” section, where Hodges maneuvered the the tricky loops and filigree with ease. This section is easily the highlight of the work. The stars sparkle in scintillating, broken arpeggios at the top of the piano over string harmonics. The sun blazes in radiating waves of brass, the music becomes very hot, incandescent, and the orchestra erupts into an ecstatic dance in seven. And underneath it all, that same sequence of chords we heard at the start, that same replicating figure of chaos in disguise. (Ugh, I have to quote Nietzsche: “I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.”)

The birds come next. This section contains perhaps some of the most virtuosic piccolo writing to date—the LA Phil should have used that as a selling-point to sell tickets, as nothing puts ass in seats these days like some virtuoso piccolo writing—the winds become an excitable, seething aviary. Everything has sex with everything else (Fugue), and the orchestra explodes into a glorious chaos of rhinos, squids, lions dodos, all wind and spit and running and jumping, crawling and flying.

The last section is a sort of cadenza, entitled “Contemplation,” a Sabbath supper for one (YHWH) after a busy week. I’m no Rashi, but a quick perusal the first two chapters of Genesis confirms that God only “sees that it was good” after each of the first 6 days. He says no such thing on the 7th day, when he’s overlooking creation as a whole. I sensed a little apprehension, a little unease in the music. At the end  that same gorgeous sequence of chords flicker in the strings and flutes like exhausted candles. Anthony Tommasini aptly sums up the work’s conclusion: “the work of creation is done. Now what?” Now we come in, and fuck the whole thing up. That’s what.

Thomas Adès turns 40 this year.  What will “late Adès” sound like?