About Some Music of Thomas Adès

About Some Music of Thomas Ades Elaine & Barkin What is it about the music of Thomas Ades that attracts and repels simultaneously? That bores and draws me in? The listening ear smacked with barrages of adroit soundfulness, the mind cognizant of awesome dexterity. Mr. Ades, a chutzpahdiker virtuoso, possesses an uncanny ability to make-keep everything both clean and dirty: even amidst clutter and clangor all sounds to be audible in the CD perfor mances I've heard. Tangled and untangled; sweet and nasty; sleazy and genteel; a surfeitof bipolarities. Music's past and present recalled; occa sionally replicated in some fashion: classical (of all eras), music hall, dance, pop, jazz, blues, disco, rock, avant garde. Mannerist surrealism. A diverse repertoire of ensembles and genres: orchestral, opera, chamber, secular, sacred, profane, choral, et al. I 66 PerspectivesofNew Music Life Story. EMI Classics, 1997. 69639 2. Performers: Thomas Ades, Valdine Anderson, Mary Carewe, Lynsey Marsh, Anthony Marwood, Louise Hopkins, David Goode, Stephen Farr. "'The time has come', the Walrus said, Catch, op. 4 (1991), clings, bloops, bumps, grinds, plinks and plunks for a while, tunes emerge, all chugs away as if an accident is about to hap pen, slowly pulling into the station and cadencing; recalled tune-scraps are recalled, Mad King-like, all gliding effortlessly into one another. Ades's knack is tomake all sound effortless, no matter thematter. As for bloops and scraps, think Jackson Pollock or Judy PfafPs 1970s-1980s walk-through garden-forest-like installations?variously colored wire, cloth, paper, who knows what?, sprouting from the floor, hanging from the ceiling. Ades makes themost ofMessiaen's Quartet for theEnd of Time ensemble?clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano?all so just right, scurrying away at the end (he often ends with an "End"). To talk ofmany things: Darknesse Visible (1992), for piano, glitters with echoes of English Renaissance music but distinct from its predecessors. The CD notes informedme that the title, harmonies, and the palpable tune-bits, derive from John Dowland's "In darkness let me dwell. . ." Deconstructed Dowland, as in getting lost and subsequently being found, all over the keyboard, in layers; but how was Ades able to keep those tremolandi going for so long? so excellently! Hands, eyes, feet busy. All told, Iwas ensnared. Of shoes?and ships Still Sorrowing, op. 7 (1991-92), also for Ades-piano-solo, this time "prepared", relies on recurrent ostinati-like chromatic licks that some how hang this Something together. As with this and other works, I wondered how it/they had been notated, with itsmid-late twentieth century improvisatory come-what-may feel and super-dense, as well as transparent, stratified textures. and sealing wax? In Five Eliot Landscapes, op. 1 (1990), Ades creates a milieu, a space, and keeps out of a singer's way thus permitting Valdine Anderson to be About Some Music ofThomas Ades 167 heard singing sweedy within an enveloping surround-sound of high-low rambling piano (mis-remembered [mis-spoken?] Chopin, Liszt, Messi aen, Boulez). Okay, he was only nineteen years old and none of us is free of influence, sometimes not for decades. But more to the point, echoes of a multitude of composers are always heard; perchance, when Mr. Ades turns forty in 2011, a surer voice will emerge, not that he is lacking in confidence. Of cabbages and kings? Life Story, op. 8b (1994). Text by Tennessee Williams, Mary Carewe bluesy singer. Downright ugly at the start, low grumble, growl?it's about a one-night stand, each guy telling his life story to the other, here for piano (I read that itwas originally for two bass clarinets and double bass which might sound even nastier and farmore distasteful). Not a good listening experience; perhaps itneeds to be "seen". (I found a ver sion on YouTube choreographed by Karole Armitage for black-male and white-female, odd considering the overt gayness of theWilliams text. Not so odd perhaps insofar asmany of Armitage's Balanchine-like works involve similarmixed couplings of "Others".) And why the sea is boiling hot? Other works on thisCD: Under Hamelin Hill, op. 6 (1992), the Pied Piper tale for three organists, and Traced Overhead, op. 15 (1996), for...