Thomas Ades has been hailed in the British musical press with such glowing encomiums that the uninitiated on this side of the Atlantic may be excused if they regard the young composer, conductor and pianist with a certain skepticism.
At 28, Ades has already been anointed the successor to Benjamin Britten. His reputation has been fueled by performances all over the world. The New York Philharmonic last week gave the premiere of his newest orchestral score, “America (A Prophesy).” EMI Classics has released four recordings of his instrumental, vocal and orchestral works, including his opera, “Powder Her Face.” This work has been presented at the Aspen Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is scheduled to receive its Chicago premiere at next year’s Chicago Humanities Festival.
As prelude, Ades came to Chicago to attend the local premieres during the 1999 festival of two of his works, “Arcadiana” for string quartet and “Darknesse Visible” for solo piano, Sunday at Symphony Center.
Taken together, both works barely suggested the composer’s unusually broad expressive range. But they did give an inkling of his extraordinary talent and made one want to hear live performances of some of his larger-scale pieces. (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, are you listening?)
Ades is a postmodernist who raids from many nests: Mozart, Schubert and Elgar in “Arcadiana,” John Dowland in “Darknesse Visible.” The composer, whose mother is an authority on surrealist art, also takes his inspiration from painting — specifically Poussin and Watteau in the string-quartet work. Both pieces are, in the words of Matias Tarnopolsky, “music of the past made present through Ades’ distorting lens.” As such, they fit smoothly into the theme of this year’s festival, “New and Old.”
The lecture delivered by Tarnopolsky, a former classmate of Ades’ at Cambridge and director of programming for the Chicago Symphony Presents series, between selections proved helpful.
“Arcadiana,” composed in 1994, is a piece of exuberant invention whose seven brief movements evoke a paradise not entirely idyllic. A violently distorted “tango of death” is punctuated by glissando air-raid sirens. Dissonances are banished by an airy, darting “L’Embarquement” and a tenderly nostalgic pastorale in the style (and same key) as the “Nimrod” movement from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” The gently rocking figures of the opening section, “Venezia notturna,” suggest a drunken gondola ride. Papageno’s silver bells and the Schubert song “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” are dimly recalled later on.
Amid such a welter of references, is it possible to discern an original voice? Indeed it is. Ades’ originality lies in his exceptional ability to absorb and transform found objects in a language that sounds like no one else’s.
The quartet performers — Mihaela Ionescu and Nisanne Howell, violins; Max Raimi, viola; Barbara Haffner, cello — argued a convincing case for this score under the baton of James Boznos. They might have projected the music more vividly were they able to venture beyond getting the notes right: Ades’ music must be lived in, not just played.
Much the same could be said for Diana Schmuck’s able account of “Darknesse Visible” (1992), a reconstruction of Dowland’s song “In darknesse let me dwell.” The notes are all Dowland’s, but the quirky new perspectives on them — delicate, repeated tremolando figures that span the highest and lowest reaches of the keyboard — are pure Ades.
