ADÈS: Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths), Opus 24
Thomas Adès was born on March 1, 1971, in London, England, where he now resides. He composed the Violin Concerto in 2005 as a joint commission by the Berliner Festspiele and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The composer led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the world premiere on September 4, 2005, with Anthony Marwood as the soloist. This week’s concerts mark the first performances of the work by the San Francisco Symphony. In addition to solo violin, Adès’s score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, three low drums of different pitches, tam-tam, clash cymbals, small bongos, metal and wood gueros, wood blocks, cowbells, and metal can and block), and strings.
Thomas Adès was still in his teens when he composed Five Eliot Landscapes (his Opus 1). Within a few years, he was being hailed as the Promising New Voice of British music. But he quickly proved he was no run-of-the-mill enfant terrible. At least in public, Adès seemed to avoid the painful identity crisis that sometimes accompanies the transition from Wunderkind to maturity. Routine comparisons with his esteemed compatriot of an earlier era, Benjamin Britten—not to mention the hyperbolic expectations attendant on each new commission—would have likely crushed a less-secure artist. However, Adès (pronounced AH-diss) has pursued a course as sure-footed as it has been unpredictable.
From the start, part of the appeal lay in how Adès managed to transcend tidy but boring pigeonholes (“Are you a postmodern postminimalist? A neoromantic postserialist?” and so on). What was clear was the energetic young composer’s scintillating ferocity and the verve of his imagination. Adès went on to surpass expectations. One indicator of his prestige was his appointment as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1999—a neat confirmation of those earlier Ben Britten analogies (Adès completed his tenure at Aldeburgh last summer).
Another indicator was his unprecedented selection for the coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2000—at twenty-nine, Adès was the youngest ever to win the Grawemeyer. Since then, he has proved his staying power with a series of triumphs in the concert hall and opera house. These include the Violin Concerto on our program, the haunting orchestral work Tevot, and his Shakespeare-inspired opera The Tempest (a huge success at its Covent Garden premiere, it has already been revived there and received its first American performances a few seasons ago by the Santa Fe Opera).
Had it not been for an epiphany at eighteen, Adès might have ended up pursuing a career at the keyboard. He remains a formidable pianist—he has even made his own arrangements of Conlon Nancarrow’s notoriously “unplayable” etudes for player piano—and actively plays chamber music as well. It was the award of second rather than first prize in a BBC-sponsored piano competition that inspired Adès to commit himself to a career as composer. The idea of currying praise by repeatedly playing the same repertory, it occurred to him in a flash, was a fate he wanted to avoid. Instead, his plan became “to go work on something new”—and thus he immediately set about composing.
Adès’s earliest pieces revolved around chamber ensemble, solo piano, or vocal and choral settings. He first composed for large orchestra in 1993’s . . . but all shall be well, written for the 150th anniversary of the Music Society of Cambridge University (where Adès studied). It’s not surprising that he also found early success writing for the stage. Adès’s musical imagination feeds off a distinctively colorful sense of theatricality. For example, his 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face is an irreverent satire drawn from tabloid stories that chronicled the fall from grace of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (who was the center of a scandalous divorce trial in 1963 and became known as “the Dirty Duchess” in hypocritically titillating exposé pictures documenting her sexual adventures). Powder Her Face satirizes our culture’s insatiable appetite for sensationalism. In the hands of Adès and librettist Philip Hensher, Powder Her Face became an ironic morality tale in the tradition of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, mixing a heady cocktail of sex, hypocrisy, class privilege, and the tabloid media.
A Nabokovian delight in the ripe possibilities of an unpredictably allusive musical language also extends to Adès’s orchestral music. Indeed, an unerring sense of theater seems to be allied, for Adès, with his instinct for shaping convincing forms in the abstract symphonic works he has undertaken. Soon after Powder Her Face, he produced his first large-scale concert piece, Asyla (1997)—the work which landed him the Grawemeyer Award. Written for a Mahler-sized orchestra, Asyla is a compact symphony that includes a frenetic movement evoking a night of London club raving and excess. (For his debut concert as director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle programmed Asyla next to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—another indication of the young composer’s high-stakes reputation.)
Christopher Fox, a fellow composer, suggests a parallel between Adès’s aesthetic and that of the Surrealist painters—“the compelling strangeness of whose work depends for its success on the evenness of painted texture, the preservation of the integrity of the picture plane and the marriage of clear pictorial design with bizarre detail.” (The composer’s mother, Dawn Adès, is an art historian and authority on the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists.)
The past decade has seen Adès consolidate elements of his musical personality, mastering them with a newfound maturity that also extends to his active career as a conductor. He has long since shored up his credentials and transcended the young artist’s need to prove himself. Not unlike the Prospero so memorably characterized in his Tempest opera, Adès has learned to tame the maelstrom of energies churning through his earlier scores; at the same time, his work of recent years seems to enrich the composer’s unassailable gifts for color, lyricism, and jump-cutting excitement with a more sustained, humane coherence.
The Violin Concerto of 2005 was Adès’s next major work following The Tempest. (Although he seems to have discontinued the practice recently, Adès assigns the opus number 24 to the piece—his retro use of old-fashioned opus numbers is a characteristically quirky touch.) While it echoes some aspects of the The Tempest’s musical world, the concerto introduces a certain austerity that Adès continues to integrate into his vocabulary. The concerto’s relatively brief span (about twenty minutes) is deceptive—a fact also true of most of his works for orchestra. His style tends to convey a high density of musical thought per square inch. Certainly the kinds of details that Adès packs into this score require extraordinary concentration and dexterity from the soloist. Anthony Marwood, the violinist for whom Adès wrote the concerto, was asked for feedback along the way (in the tradition of Brahms-Joachim or Stravinsky-Dushkin).
“There was one passage at the end of the first movement,” Marwood recalled in an interview with Chris Pasles of the Los Angeles Times before the concerto received its North American premiere, “which is one of the most stupendously hard things, and he said, ‘Is this possible?’” Marwood recalled that he wanted to avoid answering the composer’s question “because so often in history you can point to people being asked that question and saying no, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to be that person. I’m not going to be the idiot who said such-and-such a thing’s not possible when fifty years from now, everyone’s playing it.’”
On the surface, the concerto follows the familiar format of three movements in a fast-slow-fast pattern. But Adès alters the usual linear trajectory to tweak expectations. It is the central movement that occupies the center of gravity: It not only lasts slightly longer than the outer two combined but is the emotional heart around which they revolve (the composer also compares his structure to a triptych). This is the largest of the circular patterns on which Adès bases the concerto, which bears the subtitle Concentric Paths—a tongue-in-cheek archaism to conjure the music of the spheres? Each of the movements also proceeds according to its own circular design, as the composer points out. The notion of “concentric paths” in itself might describe the larger aesthetic at work in Adès’s musical universe. His scores incorporate a plurality of impulses that circulate around each other and simultaneously pull in opposite directions: centrifugal and centripetal energy.
Adès names the three movements “Rings,” “Paths,” and “Rounds.”
“Rings” unfolds as a series of restless rustlings and punctuations—an impatient perpetuum mobile against a wavering background of harmonically shifting sands or, as the composer describes it, “sheets of unstable harmony in different orbits.” The in medias res gesture of the opening recalls similar gestures ranging from Mendelssohn to Berg and even Ligeti in their violin concertos. The violin’s predominantly high perch is a characteristic of this concerto’s soundscape, although its origin might be traced to the otherworldly, high-wire coloratura Adès assigns to his soprano Ariel in The Tempest (stratospheric textures also figure significantly in the recent orchestral work Tevot). Against the restlessly shifting background, the effect is at times of an uneasy, slow-motion fall through gravity-less space. Toward the end, the intermittent sharp attacks from percussion and brass become more threatening and bring the movement to a sudden halt.
“Paths” alludes to the gravely gripping lament of a Baroque chaconne through the repetitions of its opening sequence. But its feeling is far removed from any Baroque stateliness. Adès describes the movement as involving “two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution.” He expertly plays off extremities of texture as well to generate the movement’s seismic, grinding, relentless energy. The slow tempo only heightens an underlying sense of foreboding. When its keenings successively overlap with the ensemble in the center of “Paths,” the soloist acquires an intensified expressive urgency and eloquence. By the end, the violin has been subdued to bare, throaty murmurings in its lowest range.
Relaxation arrives at last in the playful “Rounds”—despite the somewhat sinister orchestration of its opening gestures. From a rhythmically catchy, riff-like tune, “Rounds” plays out, as Adès notes, “with stable cycles moving in harmony at different rates.” Jauntily syncopated fiddling dissipates the opaque tensions built up till now. The soloist’s attention to limber pleasure is disarming, unperturbed by the cycles orbiting around it and even occasionally joining in the fray—as in the spiraling high jinks that abruptly round the concerto off .
—Thomas May
Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.
More About the Music
Recordings: Concentric Paths is available in download format from EMI in a performance conducted by the composer, with soloist Anthony Marwood and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. | Simon Rattle conducts the EMI recording of Asyla, and the composer’s persona as a pianist can be heard on Thomas Adès: Piano. | Powder Her Face is available both on CD (EMI) and DVD (Kultur)—the latter includes Gerald Fox’s 1990s documentary portrait of the composer (Thomas Adès: Music for the 21st Century).
Reading: Arnold Whittal offers an introduction to the composer in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.