Customer Reviews

Ades: Asyla [Concerto Conciso / These Premises Are Alarmed / Chamber Symphony / . . . but all shall be well]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thomas Ades gets a lot of attention because he's so young (born in 1971). He certainly has great potential, as evidenced on this disc. I recommend it ahead of the other three Ades discs. His opera, Powder Her Face, has some great music but seems pointlessly cruel and sarcastic about its easy target (a rich and spoiled woman who can't restrain her libido). The short piano pieces and little chamber pieces on the other discs don't strike me as very exciting. Ades seems to be at his best, for now, in orchestral works, such as this disc is entirely devoted to. Much of what I hear sounds as if it were influenced by late Ligeti (of the Piano and Violin Concerti), but more popular, if that makes any sense. The third movement of Asyla, for instance, sounds like a marching band gone haywire. It's fun, and the playing is certainly virtuoso. It remains to be seen where Ades will go with all his talent, whether he'll harness it towards some more profound overall vision.

Thomas Ades will easily outlast his detractors tiresome cliches about the "emperor having no clothes." This guy has dazzling wardrobes of every color you could possibly imagine. His symphonic Asyla is a real masterpiece of our time, not just the boring game of playing it safe for timid audiences, nor the heavy cerebral games of composers who've lost touch...Ades has an imagination that's totally riveting, and he knows how to keep the listener following him down the pathways and dark alleys where it leads. This is also, by the way, truly virtuoso playing by the orchestra and smaller ensembles. IT will leave your head spinning and giddy.

Thomas Adès just complete a two year residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and in those two years he produced enough evidence not only through his compositions but also with his gifts as a pianist and as a conductor that establish him as one of the more important contemporary musical artists of the day. The finale for his residency was a performance of the staggeringly unique 'Asyla for orchestra, Opus 17 which he conducted in the Disney Concert Hall to great acclaim from audience and critics alike. After that experience it is refreshing to return to this fine performance of not only the 'Asyla' but also the smaller works 'Concerto Conciso, for piano & chamber orchestra, Opus 18 (with Adès at the piano), 'These Premises Are Alarmed, for orchestra', Opus 16, '. . . but all shall be well, for orchestra, Opus 10 and the 'Chamber Symphony' Opus 2.

Simon Rattle has long been a proponent of Thomas Adès and his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group serve both composer and conductor well. Asyla is deeply married to melody and harmony and is easy for the nascent listener to understand. But the joy of Adès comes in his massive, cohesive orchestrations that take melody and then explode it into some of the most creative orchestral colors and instrumental contrasts being written today.

This is a recording to savor. Hopefully there will be other recordings of his newer works out soon, but until then for the listener who has yet to meet the master, this recording is a superb beginning. Grady Harp, December 06

Having heard much about this composer, I was finally persuaded by one of the reviews here and ordered ASYLA. I've listened to it numerous times and have to finally conclude there's nothing really new or fresh, or enjoyable or profound to be discovered here. It struck me as imitative of Michael Colgrass--and not engagingly so. I'm glad to have it in my collection, but I'm afraid I will rarely give it a listen. Perhaps I was anticipating too much, hence my disappointment--but I'm far more likely to pull out Colgrass's AS QUIET AS if I'm after inventiveness.

Good music, performances, and recordings.

Why not great? because Ades's material isn't allowed to live up to its dramatic potential. He sounds rushed to get out more and more information in each piece. There are uncountable places in all of these works where the depth of the material cries out to be revealed.

Therefore, lacking dramatic pinnacles, the individual pieces loose their identity. The cumulative effect on the listener is that of a sample CD of good contemporary music using basically the same compositional language.

The only exception might be the 3rd movement of Asyla, but even here the development is only -enough-. Given the nature of the material, the extent of climax should be merciless. I'm sure that Thomas, when writing this, thought he was going way over the top. But this is a prime psychological battle of the artist (especially in an abstract language like music). Once he thinks he has gone too far, he's just barely gone far enough.

Ades is certainly one of the great orchestrators of our generation, and there is certainly a creative spark here. He only needs to learn patience and detachment. These things will come with age and introspection and have probably been discouraged by conventional education and early adulation.

As I commented in my review of another Adès/EMI CD (Thomas Adès: Living Toys), I can't think of another case in the history of recorded music where a label has given such a staunch support to a composer than EMI with Thomas Adès. Columbia and Decca backed Stravinsky and Britten much later in their respective careers (Stravinsky was in his fifties), and left some gaps, major ones in the case of Britten (like his opera Gloriana). With the recent release of Tevot, Violin Concerto, Couperin Dances (also under Tevot Violin Concerto: Couperin Dances), EMI has offered Adès 8 instalments to date since their first release in 1997 (Ades: Catch/Darknesse Visible/Still Sorrowing/Under Hamelin Hill/Five Eliot Landscapes/Traced OVerhead/Life Story), including his two operas (Adès - Powder Her Face / Gomez, V. Anderson, N. Morris, Bryson, Almeida Ensemble, Adès and Thomas Adès: The Tempest), encompassing almost his complete output from his opus 1 (there is even an earlier piece on Thomas Adès: America: A Prophecy) to "Tevot" for orchestra, composed in 2007. Missing are only the Scenes from the Tempest and Court Studies from the same for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, and the most recent compositions.

This disc, the fourth in the series, features early (but for Adès everything then was still pretty "early") to his most recent works then (and that was 12 years ago).

The Chamber Symphony op. 2 for 15 instruments dates from 1990 and the composer was 19. It started as a Concerto for basset-clarinet but evolved into an ensemble emulating a "super-basset-clarinet". It displays many references to Jazz and the composer's great knack for instrumental color, ear-catching instrumental events, mastery at subtle and inventive orchestration (the liner notes point to a number of untraditional performance techniques, such as prepared piano, or having the trumpeter blowing across the neck of a wine-bottle tuned to D, or the brasses ever changing mutes).

I've remarked with other works that Adès seems the true heir to Britten. And it is not surprising that it is the magical sound world of Midsummer Night's Dream that should be evoked by "...but all shall be well" op. 10 from 1993, Adès first composition for large symphony orchestra. And it is before reading the liner notes that I wrote this: actually the piece "carries resonances" from Britten's setting of the same line that gives the piece its title (in the case of Adès, from a poem by TS Eliot) in the second-act finale of his opera. So imagine a slightly modernized version of the orchestral substance of Britten's masterpiece, and you'll get something like Adès' piece.

Jump three years and Adès composes "These Premises Are Alarmed" op. 16, a short and highly virtuosic Concerto for Orchestra written for the Hallé Orchestra. It displays again Adès fine sense of orchestral color and is more violent and angry than his previous compositions (and do I hear passing references to Ravel's La Valse ?), but somehow, as entertaining as it is, I find it more in line with many such orchestral showpieces composed by many young up-and-coming late 20th Century composers (Michael Rouse immediately comes to mind, although I haven't gone back to his Phaëton to check if my intuitive connection was right).

When the CD came out, Asyla, written for and premiered by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham SO in 1997, was Adès' largest composition for big orchestra. It is a highly atmospheric composition. From the outset, with its oriental-sounding symphony of cowbells followed by a very Britten-like slow moving horn chorale punctuated by soft whispers of strings playing on harmonics, Adès displays again his great sense of orchestral color. Later in the movement (at 3:12) erupt urgent and alarmed trumpet riffs, growling trombones, agitated woodwinds, fleeting references to symphonic Jazz. The same sense of color and atmosphere is in evidence again in the sparse and enigmatic tintinnabulations that open the second movement, followed by an obsessive drooping motto first played by oboe that evokes the famous BACH theme. Adès doesn't eschew the big Late-Romantic gestures, as the quasi-hollywood theme that whiffs by at 3:10 in the same movement. The scherzo starts soft with whispering strings and accelerates to a not always subtle but exhilarating romp. More hushed and mysterious atmospheres in the finale, integral with a quarter-tone piano - and do I hear echoes of Ives after 1:58 - those moments of "unanswered questioning" before the violent outburst of innumerable bands playing popular tunes ?

Concerto Conciso op. 18 for piano and chamber ensemble, completed in 1998, is then the latest composition featured on the disc. It is a nine-minute piano concerto for soloist-director, and Adès finds there a good vehicle to display his talents as pianist. Again his instrumental combination is a rare one, and again the opening gesture is quite striking - an obsessive ostinato figure played in the piano's highest register, "with tuba and double-bass rumbling far below" as the liner notes aptly put it. The concerto is jagged, jazzy, jaunty, syncopated and witty, replete with instrumental happenings - and never outstays its welcome. The reference proposed by another reviewer to "late Ligeti but more popular" is apt and makes sense.

A good survey of Adès' output from those years, then, although, in my opinion, the invention is not quite entirely as fresh and ear-catching as in the pieces featured on the above-mentioned "Living Toys" disc.

...when it comes music reviews. I purchased this CD on the weight of the review in the Financial Times (now excepted on the cover of this CD). This was done with a certain trepidation based of the FT's history of truly erroneous music journalism (they once published a concert review repeatedly referring to the band being reviewed as Splitting Pumpkins.)

The problem with this CD is that it cannot possibly live up to the hype. And let's not kid ourselves: classical music is just as prone to fads and hype as any other. With profit margins falling in the classical division, marketing efforts have redoubled and we increasingly encounter young violinists in sexy evening gowns (how else to sell the nth rendition of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto?) and now leather clad composers brooding in desolate warehouses.

So where's the beef? The title track is a four movement piece, in which the scherzo subtitled "Ecstacio" has attracted all the attention. Actually, that subtitle is more than a hint, and I must admit that I didn't pick up on it initially - then it hit me - the movement is what happens when a Cambridge-trained classical composer attends a rave. He's got the repetition and cross-rhythms going over a 4/4 techno beat. Eureka! Now it makes sense.

But what's the point? Why assemble scads of musicians to reproduce (ok, make that "enlarge upon" or "elaborate" or something) what a talented deejay can do at about one percent the cost and effort. This is truly dinosaur music. Admittedly, well produced and played dinosaur music, but dinosaur music nonetheless.

OK, "Asyla" uses an orchestra to reproduce techno whomp. How about the other pieces? Well, in the liner notes to his "Chamber Symphony," Ades is quoted to the effect that in his mind the 15 musician chamber orchestra "became infected with the personality of a solo instrument, until the whole group in my mind represented a super-basset-clarinet." Unfortunately it sounds that way too.

I heard somewhere that Paul McCartney, who apparently cannot read music, composed a symphony (or at least a tone poem) by humming the melodies and having someone else actually do the orchestration. (OK, perhaps that's an exaggeration: maybe he played the melodies on the piano, so he at least had the chord structure down as well.) While I am not suggesting that Thomas Ades has a future as Sir Paul's amanuensis, his evident orchestral talents might find better use in collaboration with others who could pair some real inspiration with his prodigious formal skills.

Few composers of recent times have evoked such mixed reactions as young Briton and Cambridge graduate Thomas Ades, with the gamut running from praise of the new hope of contemporary music to accusations of charlatan imitation of other musical trends ancient and modern. Even the individual listener can't quite decide what to make of him, and I admit that my opinion swings wildly from one extreme to the other and back while I listen to this disc. As this EMI disc contains some of his most noted pieces, it is perhaps the best introduction to the curious Ades phenomenon, it's certainly stronger than the other collections of his works out there. The CBSO performs on the large works, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music group on the small ones. Sir Simon Rattle conducts the first piece, and the composer himself conducts the rest.

"Asyla" (1997) op. 17 is a symphony in all but name, the largest work in terms of length and orchestral force that Ades has written to date, and a piece I have a love-hate relationship with. What one first notices about the piece is its novel instrumentation. Two pianists perform, one going between a concert grand and an upright, and the other playing an upright tuned a quarter-tone flat. There's an array of unusual percussion, including prominent cowbells and a sack full of silverware that's beaten with a stick. The third movement, "Ecstasio" is already infamous in contemporary music circles, for with 4/4 time and clever scoring the composer recreates the sound of mid-1990s house, bass pounding obnoxiously and woodwinds giving off trippy synth-like notes. Simon Rattle clearly loves the piece, he's toured it around the world and paired it with a Mahler symphony for his first concert leading the Berliner Philharmoniker (this performance is available on a DVD from EMI). What I take umbrage with in this piece, however, is it's overt tonalism. Clearly Ades still believes in the idea that tonalism has value since it can "tell a story", although there are as many interpretations of the piece as their are listeners, but for myself, enraptured by Boulez, Xenakis, Norgard, middle-period Lutoslawski, and others, Ades' music seems very limited, even occasionally a series of musical tropes.

The "Concerto Conciso" for piano and chamber orchestra is a two-movement work that puts the soloist in the dual role of pianist and conducter--the piano writing is mainly written for one hand to make this easier. Instead of the high style of the first work on the disc, the concerto takes inspiration from Ligeti-style zaniness, New Orleans jazz, and an obscure dance of medieval England. My complaint here is that, in spite of some potentially interesting theory, the concerto is quite unfocused and bespeaks a certain immaturity on the part of the composer.

"These Premises Are Alarmed" (1996) returns to the vast orchestral dimensions of the first piece but is less than four minutes long. It speedily examines various parts of the orchestra, and ends with an alarm-like ringing. This is for me the least problematic work on the disc, a veritable okay work, which fits alongside the three-star efforts of composers like Peter Lieberson and Peter Eotvos.

The last two works on the disc return to the problems of the piano concerto. The "Chamber Concerto" seeks to draw all instruments close to a basset clarinet persistently in the background, but goes nowhere. "but all shall be well" (1993) op. 10 takes its title from the "Four Quartets" of T.S. Eliot, a composer who has given great inspiration to Ades--his op. 1 was a setting of Eliot's five "Landscape" poems. In this purely instrumental work, Ades meanders through some vaguely pastoral scenes, but the music doesn't really do much.

The pieces here at times engage the listener, at times infuriate, and all in all cannot securely stand on the ground of worthy listening.

Asyla is powerful, cohesive, driving music. Ades is the best hope for the future of serious music. This is classical music for people who hate modern music, yet strive for originality and not Muzak. He could be the Beethoven of the 21st Century!

I took a chance on this and it's great! I'll leave the details of HOW it's great to the musicologists, but I've listened to it 25 times without boredom. I keep thinking, "Why put something else on?" Okay, I finally did, but now I can't wait to hear it again. Uncharacteristic behavior for me.