Tevot, Violin Concerto, Couperin Dances

Thomas Ades (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 23, 2010)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Emi Classics
• ASIN: B0032HKEMM
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,736 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #22 in Music > Classical > Ballets & Dances > Dances

Editorial Reviews

EMI Classics presents the world premiere release of three of Thomas Adès' new works recorded live, partly conducted by the composer himself, and, in the case of Tevot, by Sir Simon Rattle with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

"Tevot" means "arks" in Hebrew but another meaning is also "bars in a piece of music." In a The Guardian interview with Tom Service Adès said: "I liked the idea that the bars of the music were carrying the notes as a sort of family through the piece. And they do, because without bars, you'd have musical chaos. But I was thinking about the ark, the vessel, in the piece as the earth. (...) It sounds a bit colossal, but it's the idea of the ship of the world. "The work was commissioned by the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker and the Carnegie Hall Corporation. The work was premiered by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle at the Philharmonie in Berlin in February 2007 and received its US premiere, also with Berliner Philharmoniker and Rattle, at Carnegie Hall in November 2007. To Sir Simon Rattle, Adès "may be the most extravagantly gifted of (young UK composers)" and he and the Berliner Philharmoniker program his works frequently.

In September 2005 his Violin Concerto for Anthony Marwood was premiered at the Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Thomas Adès' baton.

Since the release of Adès' opera The Tempest on EMI Classics in June 2009, the recording has gathered attention on a global scale. In France, the disc was recently awarded the prestigious Diapason d'Or de l'année. Reviews in general have been glowing with praise and the album was a `Critic's Choice' pick in Opera News.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adès, the architect and showman, April 9, 2010

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tevot, Violin Concerto, Couperin Dances (Audio CD)

Thomas Adès has burst the cage of repetitive minimalism, embraced the 'big sounds' of the great post-romantic composers and incorporated much of the 20th century giants of composition and continues to produce works that are at once fascinating in construction but even more important, exceptionally exhilarating in performance. He seems to love going for big effects that push the current minimalist constraints to the edge and then makes fun of history and tradition while wallowing in it.

This excellent recording contains his Violin Concerto performed by Anthony Marwood - a work that seems to bind the solo violin into an obbligato with the orchestral fabric, each movement in this study of circles and orbits winds its way into an amalgam of intricately contrapuntal parts that are pure delight to hear: music that makes you think while at the same time entertains you.

The TEVOT has been well reviewed here and is a fine work that would require several hearings to appreciate it to the fullest: Sir Simon Rattle conducts it with conviction and a keen sense of structure. But the practically unmentioned joy of this CD is the section of excerpts from Adès' opera 'Powder Her Face', a very large scale orchestration (by Adès) of the Overture, Waltz, and Finale originally written for an orchestra of 15. The result is a series of sexy, sensual dances, a lot of tongue in cheek humor and huge dose of terrific fun. Thomas Adès is without a doubt one of our current finest composers. At a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, serving as guest conductor, he conducted his new 'These Premises are Alarmed', excerpts from 'Powder Her Face' and the Violin Concerto (with Marwood) as the first half and then proved to the audience that he goes for the guts ball antics and bombast of Respighi's 'Feste Romane'. He proved his mettle! Grady Harp April 10

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Adès' embrace of the third Millenium, March 25, 2010

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Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tevot, Violin Concerto, Couperin Dances (Audio CD)

Whatever you think of Thomas Adès (substance or mere hype?), credit - and praise - must go to EMI for its staunch support, from the very first steps, of this shooting star among composers. I can think of no other case in the history of recorded music where a label has given such a backup to a composer and from so early on in his development. Columbia with Stravinsky and Decca with Britten started much later in their respective composer's career (Stravinsky was already in his mid-fifties) and left gaps in the discography - minor ones with Stravinsky but some big ones with Britten (like his opera Gloriana). And, speaking of gaps, just think of DG and Henze.

But now, with this 8th instalment in a series of portraits begun in 1997, all of Adès' output has been documented on disc, except for his most recent compositions: "In Seven Days" for orchestra (2008) and "Lieux Retrouvés" for cello and piano (2009) (information retrieved from his publisher's website), and two offshoots from his opera the Tempest ("Scenes from The Tempest" and "Court Studies" for clarinet, violin, cello and piano).

These are the seven previous instalments, in chronological order of publication:

Début "Catch", Ades: Catch/Darknesse Visible/Still Sorrowing/Under Hamelin Hill/Five Eliot Landscapes/Traced OVerhead/Life Story, 1997 (a)

Debut "Living Toys", Thomas Adès: Living Toys, 1998 (b)

Adès - Powder Her Face / Gomez, V. Anderson, N. Morris, Bryson, Almeida Ensemble, Adès 1998

Asyla, Ades: Asyla, These Premises Are Alarmed, etc. / Rattle, et al, 1999, reissued as Ades: Asyla (c)

Thomas Adès: America: A Prophecy, 2004 (d)

Adès: Piano Quintet; Schubert: "Trout Quintet", 2005

Thomas Adès: The Tempest, 2009.

Due to the length limitations of these reviews, I'll send to the "comments" section the catalog of Adès' works and the indication of the CD on which they are documented (the present one is e). You will see that while the previous instalments barely tapped the new century (with the major exception of Adès second opera, The Tempest, which evidently monopolized his attention in the early 2000s), this new disc, with the post-Tempest compositions, is entirely Adès in the third Millenium - and in his mid-thirties.

Substance or hype then? I'd rather phrase the question: unique compositional personality or nothing to really distinguish Adès from the so many other composers that vie for recognition these days? Somewhere in between, I'd say. What I greatly enjoyed in the "early" Adès (not that anything that he is writing now can be considered "late") was the art which with he played with traditions without ever being bound to them, his unique knack for unexpected and ear-catching instrumental colors and combinations, his jagged contours that somehow always seemed entirely natural. Some of that is present in "Tevot", but some of it is also gone, I find. There are lush and mysterious atmospheres - try the beginning's deep, brooding, descending melody with the violin's high-pitched harmonics hovering above: it could be a slightly modernized version of Britten's Peter Grimes (and that Adès is Britten's true heir is something I've often remarked); but the music's deep wave-tides are both very effective and somewhat facile, I find, in their tonal anchoring. Another brief Britten reminiscence in the scherzando passage starting at 3:59, but it is more jagged and soon evolves into an awesome quasi-cacophony (at times not so far removed from Steven Martland's Babi Yar, Steve Martland: Babi Yar/Drill), once past a more affirmative and heroic passage at 5:12 that seems out of early Copland. Speaking of which, I hear more reminiscences here than usually with Adès - the presence of Janacek is also striking in the wild fanfares at 6:15 (again at 8:50) that seem straight out of the Sinfonietta and Glagolithic Mass. Then comes a more brooding and questing section at 9:03 - more deep tidal waves and more hushed and high-pitched violin harmonics - leading to a hackneyed pastoral theme first intoned by the flutes, and developing into a long section climaxing into a triumphant but somewhat corny statement; is Adès here trying to prove that he can also write like the populist Copland or Vaughan Williams or even Delius? I have nothing against pastoral or triumphant lyricism, but I question the interest of copying the time-worn formulas of others rather than inventing one's own. Still, Tevot is powerful and effective, often impressive even, although I don't quite hear Adès' unique originality.

There is more of that in the Violin Concerto, with its tense and dense lyrical violin line over an orchestral accompaniment that in the first movement, plays with the conventions of minimalism, but in typical Adès manner, never slave to it. The finale again brings back reminiscences - Szymanowski, Bartok, Stravinsky. These two outer movements are remarkably compact. The longer second movement in form of a Chaconne is ear-catching in its rugged and almost pointillistic orchestral accompaniment and again highly-charged lyrical violin.

The Three Couperin "Studies" (that's what Adès calls them but they are brilliant orchestrations in fact) and the sarcastic three movements from the opera "Powder her face", adapted here for large orchestra, are less significant, but they are entertaining.

One thing that made Adès such a hit was that, while evidently perfectly aware of and comfortable with even the most avant-garde compositional and instrumental techniques developed in the 20th Century and using them at will in his compositions, he always put them at the service of music that was eminently graspable and entertaining - at least for ears attuned to 20th and 21st Century music. The compositions featured here do not depart from thatt rule. But still, Adès started so strong, I'm not sure he is capable of maintaining the sense of surprise work after work. Well - Britten and Stravinsky did.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Breakthrough, May 18, 2011

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Barnaby Thieme (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tevot, Violin Concerto, Couperin Dances (Audio CD)

This collection of recordings documents a decisive shift in the career of Thomas Adès. While continuities can readily be found with his previous work, in my opinion this marks his transition from a promising young artist to a position of mastery. In particular, "Tevot" and the violin concerto evidence a breathtaking new concept for developing musical ideas that is not like anything I have heard before -- one that offers a persuasive new technique for the arrangement of musical ideas.

Tevot is particularly instructive in this regard, and might be regarded as unfolding in three primary movements. The first movement suggests echoes of Charles Ives with its dissonant jumble of juxtaposed motives and rhythms, ever on the brink of cacophony. As with Ives, the dense array of textures and themes forms a turbulent body rich with latent possibilities, so that when independently-developed voices suddenly converge into a unified, hammering rhythm, the listener is awash with the retrospective sense of how carefully the unison was prepared in the preceding apparent chaos.

In the second brief movement, the dissonance yields to a spacious and sonorous array of softly voiced chords, preparing the ground for the magnificent third movement. The last section prepares a polyphonic array of gently probing melodic lines that coil softly upwards, reminding me of the tender shoots of spring emerging from the hard earth with their own implacable resolve. The lovely ascending assortment of sinuous voices gradually rises into full flower, when the thematic melodies are vigorously asserted by the orchestra in concert, leading to a gorgeous resolution.

This is simply electrifying stuff, not only rich in attractive melodic material, but thrilling in its novel formal elements. As a listener always excited to get a sense of what untrodden paths music will take as minimalism enters old age and the sonata form is long dead, it's thrilling to hear such a richly-developed and novel structure.

I could give a similar reading for the marvelous and expressive violin concerto, but in formal terms it follows a similar broad outline as Tevot. In fact, I believe they are ill served by being placed in succession, as the violin concerto is so similar on the surface, but so alive with its own vitality. I always make a point of listening to them separately.

Of Adès's beguiling sport with Couperin and playful reworking of his own "Powder Her Face," I will observe that he has two principle moods: dramatic and sarcastic. These two works belong to the latter category, and are drenched with a dry humor that does not detract from their loveliness any more than bawdy humor detracts from "The Twelfth Night."

In my opinion Adès is probably the most exciting composer working today, largely on the strength of his more recent work, including these compositions. Having recently experience his recent "Polaris," I'm confident that he will continue to mine a rich, expressive idiom that is quite distinct.