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Thomas Adès at 40 *
by Drew Massey
Few classical musicians have enjoyed a rapid ascent comparable
to that of the British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès. Adès
attracted international notice with his first opera, Powder Her Face (1995).
Written when he was just twenty-three, it was a Succes de scandale and
became notorious for its fourth scene in which the main character, the
Duchess, sings – or rather hums – an aria while fellating a waiter. Hav-
ing set such a new high-water mark for musical onomatopoeia, Adès saw
his stock continue to rise: he won two of the most prestigious prizes in
composition, the von Siemens Prize and the Grawemeyer Award in 1999
and 2000, respectively, for his orchestral work Asyla (1997). By the time
he was appointed Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1999 he
had already secured a place as a young superstar in the British musical
establishment, with critics offering frequent, breathless comparisons to
Benjamin Britten.
Adès turned forty in March of 2011, so that writers have gradu-
ally stopped exclaiming over his youth and now define his significance
principally by focusing on an ever growing body of music remarkable for
its breadth and depth. The Ades canon includes two celebrated operas and
approximately forty works in all, from pieces for solo piano to enormous
orchestral behemoths replete with moving images designed and executed
*Review of Adès: Anthology (EMI Classics, 2011)
Thomas Adès at 40 195
Thomas Àdes
photograph by Brian Voice
by Adès’s civil partner, the filmmaker Tal Rosner. Already there are efforts
under way to summarize Adès’s work to date. In 2007, the Barbican Center
in London hosted a festival in his honor entitled “Traced Overhead”; the
Présences Festival in Paris played twenty-two of his works in the same
season. Another retrospective took place in Los Angeles, where he lives
part-time, early in 2011.
For the broader listening public, perhaps the most important event
marking Adès’s fortieth year was the release last fall of Adès: Anthology.
Even though EMI has vigorously promoted and distributed his albums,
the release of this two CD set seems striking. Other composers on the
label have been similarly honored this year: Karl Jenkins also with a two
album conspectus, and Arthur Bliss with a collection of five discs. But
Jenkins is almost thirty years older than Adès and Bliss died in 1975. To
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issue an anthology at this point in Adès’s career – even as the liner notes
assiduously avoid discussing his status as a recent prodigy – is perhaps to
traffic in his precociousness for the last time. Adès has moved on from his
boy wonder status, and the world has found younger composers to fete:
this year his fellow countryman Steven Daverson became the youngest
von Siemens laureate ever at age twenty-six. So maybe a stock-taking
is in order, now that admirers of Adès must consider his music without
recourse to the flash and excitement associated with his status as an enfant
terrible.
As a survey of Adès’s career, the two and a quarter hours of
Anthology give plenty of evidence of Adès’s compositional versatility
and musical polymathy. The first disc is given over to chamber works; the
other to orchestral music. Perhaps surprisingly, his two operas Powder
Her Face and The Tempest, which together form one of the most impor-
tant pillars of his output (and the basis for many of the comparisons with
Britten), are conspicuous in their absence from this recording. Neither
is there any trace of the other vocal music, with the sole exception of
America: A Prophecy, for soprano and orchestra. And yet the Anthology
surveys virtually all of Adès’s career, from his 1990 Chamber Symphony
up to his Mazurkas and Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face, both
premiered in 2010. Only these last two pieces are newly recorded, with
everything else drawn from Adès’s existing catalog with EMI. In addition
to this chronological breadth, Adès’s skills as a conductor and pianist are
showcased throughout the set, as he conducted every recording on the
orchestral disc except Living Toys, and played piano on all the pieces on
the first disc except for the string quartet Arcadiana.
The musical past—call it “the tradition,” if you like—continues
to be present in many of these pieces, particularly the chamber works,
through Adès’s use of existing styles, materials, and conventions. Adès
himself described the Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face as be-
ing “rather in the manner of Liszt or Busoni.” The Mazurkas trade in and
amplify gestures from the genre Chopin immortalized. Arcadiana quotes
Mozart and alludes to Elgar. Some of his other works not included on the
set, such as his arrangements of Couperin and Dowland, also parry and
spar with earlier composers. And even if from time-to-time he distances
himself from certain labels – he has hesitated to offer non-descriptive titles
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like “Sonata” out of a concern that they might be construed as too “neo-
classical” – one thing that makes Adès’s music refreshing and distinctive
is the virtuosity with which he embraces past styles without ever seeming
anxious about his influences. Put another way, Adès’s music is entirely in
keeping with a younger generation of composers who have grown up in a
world permeated with recorded sound, in which styles and genre do not
necessarily follow one another in a historical progression, but are arrayed
side-by-side in record bins, and, in the digital age, are accessed randomly
at the click of the button.
Yet even among his more adventurous contemporaries, Adès
stands out, and his use of musical allusion is particularly compelling
because he refuses to allow it to become an end in itself. Adès seems to
have little use for poly-stylistic mashups for their own sake, but can fold
a melody into the middle of an opera that sounds as if the character is
quoting an old cabaret tune. Is it borrowed? New? The moment is over
before the listener can even fully form these questions, and the questions,
or uncertainties, remain even after multiple hearings. Similarly, Adès’s
frenetic second Mazurka takes one of Chopin’s signature moves – a light
ornament within a leaping melody – and makes it the basis for a skittering,
frantic explosion all over the upper reaches of the keyboard. Even Adès’s
more semantically ambiguous moments – what does it mean to quote a
few beats from Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria at the very end of the
second movement of Arcadiana? – draw listeners deeper in, rather than
leaving them glancing off a shimmering surface of reference and allusion,
an experience I’ve known more than once while listening to Luciano Berio
or Nico Muhly.
In an effort to come to grips with Adès, to place him or at least
to draw useful analogies, several commentators have described certain
works by Adès as “surreal.” Richard Taruskin first articulated this view
more than ten years ago, writing that Adès’s music “achieves its special
atmosphere, and projects its special meanings, through improbable sonic
collages and mobiles: outlandish juxtapositions of evocative sound-objects
that hover, shimmering, or dreamily evolve, in a seemingly motionless
sonic emulsion.” The British writers Christopher Fox and Arnold Whittall
have also noted Adès’s allegiances with surrealist visual artists. Fox, for
example, notes “Adès’s uncanny ability to give elegant, eloquent musical
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form to strange and disturbing subjects, to be subversive in very public
places,” and provides the example of America: A Prophecy.
In an interview with Vivien Schweitzer, Adès himself has said
that surrealism is “the only ‘ism’ that I feel at all comfortable with. Writing
and playing music at all is completely surreal. You are sort of sculpting
in air, which gives you complete freedom to do what you want.” Writers
who have emphasized Adès’s surrealist allegiances have usually also
mentioned that his mother, Dawn Adès, is a professor of art history who
has specialized in surrealism, lending the view an air of biographical heft.
But I doubt that Prof. Adès would let it slide if one of her Ph.D. students
at University of Essex defined surrealism as “sculpting in air.” Indeed,
Adès’s comment reflects the range of possible meanings that surrealism
has acquired in casual conversation, to the point where it can now be
used to signify just about any event which is odd, unexpected, or out of
the ordinary. The risk here is that surrealism will become a catch-all for
Adès’s sensibility and lead to a reductive view of his music’s expressive
ambit, as listeners patiently wait for musical parallels to melting clocks
or Ceci n’est pas une pipe moments while ignoring other facets of the
music.
One thing that the Anthology does well is to situate Adès’s music
as a response not only to surrealism, but also to other modernist tenden-
cies, such as the fascination with automata. Adès’s work Living Toys,
for example, recapitulates the modernist attraction to objects animated
by sheer force of the imagination. The score opens with an anonymous
Spanish epigram:
When they asked him what he wanted to be, the boy did not name
any of the men’s occupations, as they had all hoped he would,
but replied: “I am going to be a hero, and dance with angels
and bulls, and fight with bulls and soldiers, and die a hero in a
distant place, and be buried a hero.” Hearing this child’s words,
the men felt small, understanding that they were not heroes,
and that their lives were less substantial than the dreams which
surround him like toys.
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The sections of Living Toys bear evocative titles such as “Aurochs,” “Mi-
litiamen,” and “H.A.L.’s Death.” Through the work Adès conjures wild,
genre-bending textures. The movement “Aurochs” (referring to an extinct
species of cattle) is a distorted flamenco dance, with clapping, castanets,
and a wailing clarinet. “Militiamen” requires a “talking trumpet” in which
the performers shape the sound with nonsense syllables, evoking a child’s
vision of the splendid fanfare of army life. Still later, Adès explains in a
program note, the boy is “in a film, in deepest space, dismantling a great
computer … the little astronaut whistles his tune like the sweet fifing of a
tiny recorder.” The very conceit of Living Toys, in which a fantasy world
featuring H.A.L. and bulls comes alive for a boy, aligns Adès with com-
posers such as Ravel, who also explored worlds full of machines, dreams,
and the past, especially in his opera L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges.
This fascination with the mechanical is manifested in several
different ways in other pieces. The stunning virtuosity of some of the
works, such as the Concert Paraphrase and the Piano Quintet, seems to
demand more and more from the performers, as if they might one day
become superhuman androids themselves. Moreover, Adès’s interest in
Nancarrow, a composer famous for writing fantastically complicated
music for player pianos, suggests another way in which the fine line
between virtuosity and the mechanical fascinates him. Although Adès
shrugs off the difficulty of his works – he once said “I’m simply writing
down what’s in the music and it shouldn’t box in the performer any more
than Bach writing out an ornament” – his demands on the player are
formidable. Many accomplished performers have been surprised at how
hard it is to find purchase on the sheer slopes of his writing. The voices
don’t align, the piano works demand an instinctive command of the entire
geography of the keyboard at once, and his rhythmic constructions can
be fierce even in passages that sound relatively relaxed. This ferocious
and unremitting difficulty in Adès’s music has created something of a
dissonance between the world Adès lives in and the one he explores in
his music. At the same time that the listener is transported away from the
phenomenal world, the performer is ensnared in the moment to moment
vertigo of carrying out Adès’s notation. This has not appeared to curb the
frequency of performances of his music, though, and in the context of the
new recorded anthology the listener is spared any visual cues that might
signal a performer’s distress.
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Fantastical worlds are built in other works in this collection, in
each case by somewhat different means. For example, Adès’s interest in
the evanescent is reflected in his string quartet Arcadiana, which focuses
on “ideas of the idyll, vanishing, vanished, or imaginary.” In America: A
Prophecy, Adès sets his work to a dystopic text by Matteo Flexa, about a
country in which “the people move as if in dreams / they are weak from
fuck and drink.” This appetite for flights of fancy is one aspect of what
Tom Service, a British journalist who has championed Adès’s music,
emphasizes in his short liner notes for the collection. Service notes that
Adès’s music is not unified by “a style, or a network of musical or melodic
similarities that would define each piece as inherently ‘Adèsian.’ It’s what
each work does to you as a listener.” Much of this music does seem to be
about inhabiting far flung and far out worlds; worlds which are somehow
fantastical and damaged at the same time. Thus the shattered glass motif
on the cover of the album would seem entirely appropriate.
Given Adès’s penchant for these tightly constructed neo-modernist
works which transport the listener to another world, it is worth noting that he
is equally happy to write perfectly non-referential (or so-called “absolute”)
music, represented on the Anthology by the Chamber Symphony (1990),
Piano Quintet (2000), and Violin Concerto (2005). With the possible ex-
ception of the Violin Concerto, which has three movements titled “Rings,”
“Paths,” and “Rounds,” these works don’t refer to any extramusical proj-
ect. If Adès is known for works which have some programmatic quality,
in these other works he shows himself to be perfectly capable of writing
compelling music without any declared meaning outside of the sounding
body of the work itself. They reveal a versatility of compositional styles:
the Chamber Symphony features a wailing clarinet against a jazzy, pointil-
list orchestration; the Piano Quintet coordinates the performing forces of
strings against the piano and refracts the music through crushing rhythmic
misalignments; the Violin Concerto is an exemplar of shiny and energetic
virtuosic writing. But even in these ostensibly absolute works, Adès writes
in an environment in which instrumental music has long been understood
to be prestigious precisely because it afforded access to a world beyond
the reach of words. As E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote in 1813, “Music discloses
to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the
external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves
Thomas Adès at 40 201
behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible
longing.” Although Hoffmann is the quintessential Romantic hero, his
comments continue to reflect the appeal for many audience members of
a large body of concert music from the last two centuries. Even in Adès’s
absolute music, then, the potential for music to transport the listener to
strange new worlds is very much in evidence.
Adès is a reluctant interviewee, so his conversation with the tenor
Ian Bostridge which is included as part of the liner notes is a valuable ad-
dition to the set, giving a glimpse into how Adès sees the broader impact
of his work. Bostridge is a longtime collaborator with Adès, and one might
be forgiven for thinking that he collegially lobs up some softballs just so
that Adès can swat them cleanly with all his might:
Bostridge: Can you define the authenticity of expression needed
to be a great composer, or is it just something you have a nose
for?
Adès: How should I know? What I’m obsessed with is putting
one note after the other with a sense of the consequences that will
build up as you do it and I just think it matters utterly whether
you choose one note or another, but it’s not moral or political. It’s
simply to reach the truth of the idea as fully as possible.
Bostridge: All art is political, isn’t it?
Adès: I am absolutely incapable of understanding that idea! I
really don’t know what that means.
Adès’s dismissal of Bostridge’s line of questioning reflects Adès’s grow-
ing certainty that his works speak for themselves. Adès also commented
recently that “I feel about my pieces a bit perhaps like a parent. I am not
them, and they are not me. And I didn’t want to be a kind of embarrassing
dad.” In this respect Adès stands apart from composers and other visual
artists who rely on extended essays and manifestos to explain and clarify
their work.
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Whatever the conviction that resonates in the composer’s responses
to interview questions, Adès is clearly ambivalent about the relation of
his music to society. In the interview from the liner notes, Bostridge goes
on to ask Adès if classical music has become “divorced” from culture.
Adès: No, it’s living in the attic! It’s not divorced!
Bostridge: Do you think it can come out of the attic? Do you
think it ever will?
Adès: It’s sort of an Anne Frank situation, isn’t it? It’s almost
more alive being in the attic!
Adès’s mixed metaphors are apt. Positioning contemporary classical
music in this way – neither divorced from nor married to larger cultural
movements, and better off for the ambiguity – amounts to an artful dodge
on Adès’s part, saving him from having to come down too strongly on
either side of the debate between relevancy and autonomy that has been
ongoing in contemporary composition circles for decades.
It is hard to guess where Adès’s career may lead; no new works
are listed among the more than fifty performances of his music which
have been announced by his publisher Faber for 2012. There have been
preliminary announcements for an opera based on Luis Buñuel’s film The
Exterminating Angel which will be premiered in Salzburg at some point in
the next few years, suggesting that Adès will continue to develop a relation-
ship with surrealism. If The Exterminating Angel opera is anything like
his work on The Tempest, it may be his only new work for several years.
Considering how rapidly his style has evolved already, it is impossible to
say on what terms his music will be understood after that. But perhaps that
is the point, since Adès seems comfortable as a determined, unpredictable
voyager, charting out unknown terrain.1 “People don’t want to be given
what they want,” Adès once noted, reflecting on his audiences. “They
want to find whole worlds they didn’t know they could want.” Given his
penchant for restless searching, one can only eagerly anticipate what his
next forty years will bring.
