Notes from the Edge

PROSPECT MAY ARTS & BOOKS Neil Norman Notes from the edge Recommends Thomas Adès is the most gifted British composer of his time, but his love of musical extremes holds him back, argues Ivan Hewett Opera Don Carlo “Even as the UK is brimming with wonderful one high-prestige venue to another, con- Royal Opera House, 12th to 29th May Inspired by Schiller’s 1787 dramatic young composers, I think few would dispute ducting in Salzburg one week, Los Angeles poem, Verdi’s masterpiece went through that Tom Adès may be the most extrava- the next. Some years ago his music was the a number of revisions. When Luchino gantly gifted of them all.” So claims Simon subject of three major retrospectives simul- Visconti directed the five-act version at Rattle, who will soon be returning from Ber- taneously, on three different continents. As Covent Garden in 1958, it was con- lin to lead the London Symphony Orches- an awed critic said to me, not even Britten sidered unbeatable. Nicholas Hytner’s tra. Few would dispute his assertion. Born in attracted attention on such a scale. version (below) made its debut in 2008 London in 1971, Thomas Adès studied piano Yet more superlatives are being thrown and has become a Royal Opera stalwart. and composition at the Guildhall before at Adès in the wake of the recent premiere Although the auto-da-fé sequence still going on to create orchestral and operatic in Salzburg of his opera The Exterminating troubles some, it is a worthy successor to works that have won him enormous acclaim Angel. (It comes to Covent Garden on 24th the Visconti. The Renaissance has rarely and popularity—even among those who tra- April). Based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surreal- looked—or sounded—so profound, dark ditionally avoid modern classical music. For ist film, it follows the fate of 15 dinner guests and compelling. US tenor Bryan Hymel some he is our greatest composer since Ben- trapped in a dining room by some unseen takes on the challenging title role. jamin Britten. power as they descend into madness and And yet Rattle’s praise doesn’t quite strike anarchy. The praise has been rapturous. “A the right note. He suggests Adès differs from turning point for Adès and opera itself,” said his peers simply in the “extravagance” of his the Observer; the Telegraph, more circum- gifts. But in many respects Adès is unique. spect, commented on the music’s hyperac- He floats above other composers at a rar- tivity mingled with rapt beauty and brilliant efied altitude of celebrity, winning in his moments of parody. twenties prizes that normally go to compos- Adès’s uncanny brilliance can’t be denied; ers in their seventies. He first came to pop- but a balanced critical evaluation of his work ular attention with his 1995 opera Powder is overdue. “Miraculous” is how his music is Her Face, his portrayal (with librettist Philip often described, and as with all miracles, Hensher) of the tragicomic fate of the scan- attempts to judge his work seem to be ruled dalous Duchess of Argyll. That work is now an act of impiety. Given his fame, the almost a fixture in the operatic repertoire. complete absence of serious critical writing

© CATHERINE ASHMORE © CATHERINE One of Adès’s favourite quotations is from on Adès is astonishing; for whatever his tal- André Breton: “Life is elsewhere.” And that’s ents, he is far from the finished article. where he always seems to be—flitting from This is an extreme version of some- Ravi Shankar’s Sukanya thing we’ve seen before. The English have a Curve, Leicester, 12th May then touring strange need to discover a wunderkind every Legendary sitar-player Ravi Shankar began decade or so, as if to reassure themselves composing his only opera at the age of 90. that the land ohne musik—as a German critic Now the Royal Opera and London Phil- sniffily described us in 1904—can now hold harmonic join forces to produce a semi- its head up high. In the 1970s, it was Oliver staged touring production which begins in Knussen; in the 1980s, it was George Ben- Leicester and ends at the Royal Festival jamin. Just as Benjamin was entering into a Hall. Named after Shankar’s wife, it tells protracted fallow period in the early 1990s, a of Princess Sukanya in a tale derived from young Adès came along, right on cue. the Mahabarata. Shankar employs both His Chamber Symphony was premiered Indian and western classical music in a in 1991 when he was still a music student fusion of dance, music and myth. Susanna at Cambridge. At the time rumours had Hurrell takes the title role and the Aakash already spread about a talented young Odedra Company choreograph. composer who wore white suits and The Magic Flute looked like Oscar Wilde. He reached the Charles Court Opera, King’s Head, Lon- final of BBC Young Musician of the Year don, 4th May to 3rd June as a pianist in 1990, was an expressive if The King’s Head plays host to the Charles ungainly conductor of his own works and Court Opera company, whose “boutique” a dazzling composer. productions of Gilbert & Sullivan have The critical terms used to describe established it as punching well above its Chamber Symphony have clung to Adès weight. Their pared-down version of The ever since. He “entrances” his listen- Magic Flute has already had critics reach- ers with magical, glittery sounds, ing for superlatives after its debut at Ilford Arts Opera Festival last year. Sung in a Strange and familiar: Thomas new version by John Savournin and David Adès is a musical phenomenon Eaton, this beautiful production includes

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The dinner party scenario of The Exterminating Angel is perfectly attuned to Adès’s claustrophobic world © SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE / MONIKA RITTERSHAUS FESTSPIELE © SALZBURGER

which have the fascinating quality of being That same feeling is often prompted Germans love music with ponderous politi- “strange and familiar” at once. “He weaves by Adès’s music. A particularly striking cally-charged appeals to emotional depths. parody and mimicry, subliminal echoes example occurs in the big orchestral fresco We have elfin lightness. Is it any accident and ingenious borrowings, into a voice Asyla, an evocation of spaces that can either that the most celebrated English singer uniquely and fabulously his own,” said the threaten incarceration or offer sanctuary. of recent decades is Ian Bostridge, whose Independent. It’s full of the ear-tickling sound of cowbells, unearthly high tones are so well-suited to Many of the same adjectives had already tin cans, knives and forks, and an upright Britten’s music? (Adès and Bostridge once been applied to those earlier wunderkinden. piano which is a quarter-tone flat. Again the collaborated on a performance of Schubert’s It’s surely no accident that Adès, Knussen Winterreise, which was strange, haunted and Benjamin are all published by Faber “If Adès can find a way of and “extra-terrestrial” in exactly the way Music, which was co-founded by Britten in one expected). 1965. There is a definite family resemblance cultivating the centre Adès would probably take being pigeon- running through all four: an expressive ground rather than holed as a purveyor of fey English enchant- world best described as magical. mounting guerrilla raids ment as evidence of the essential stupidity Britten had a genius for evoking of critics. For a composer who has been so enchanted states, where sometimes the on it, he could become uniformly praised, he has a puzzling loath- magic is good as in A Midsummer Night’s the great composer he ing of critics. (He has a furious contempt for Dream, and sometimes rotten to the core, some composers too, once labelling Wag- as in The Turn of the Screw. The sound of ought to be” ner as “fungal.”) He absolutely doesn’t want glittery-tuned percussion runs through his to be compared with the wunderkinden of music, a sound that reappears refracted effect is of delicious uncertainty and dislo- recent decades, and has done his best to dis- through the sound-world of avant-garde cation. One literally can’t believe one’s ears. tance himself from Britten by pouring scorn composers like Pierre Boulez and György His opera The Tempest, first seen at Covent on his music. “In The Turn of the Screw the Ligeti. Knussen composed two operas Garden in 2004, is full of musical “enchant- formal conceits only show up the one-dimen- based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s sto- ment” as befits Shakespeare’s late romance. sionality of the piece,” he says, one of many ries, which are shot through with echoes It has a big part for a coloratura soprano, instances of lèse-majesté in his fascinating vol- of Modest Mussorgsky and Maurice Ravel. who at one point is required to sing a top E ume of conversations with Tom Service enti- George Benjamin’s music is magical in its 18 times in a row. tled Full of Noises. essence. In his early Chamber Symphony The magical strain appeals to the Eng- There is indeed something distinctive there are moments when you ask your- lish. They warm to things suggestive of light- about Adès. To get a sense of what that is, self “what is making that extraordinary ness and the otherworldly. Americans warm one only has to listen to the third movement sound?”—and discover it’s newspapers to pop-flavoured minimalism, tinged by of Asyla. It’s a symphonic evocation of a club being torn. strenuous aspiration and triumphalism; the night, with a pounding four-in-a-bar rhythm

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and a deliberately crude phrase in high vio- it’s joined by others at a greater altitude. Anjana Ahuja lins, repeated incessantly. As the drums The effect is something like watching a giant pound, a jagged woodwind phrase rises waterfall. The movement is always down, but against it in an opposing rhythm. One feels there’s never an arrival, because the waterfall Recommends the music approaching the edge of some- is always being renewed from above. Perhaps thing dangerous—chaos or frenzy. Far from a better analogy are those videos of fractal Science being genuinely crude, the music is hugely curves on YouTube, which split and burgeon sophisticated. Like a Chopin waltz, it’s not and multiply in a way that is both fascinating a real dance but an artful portrait of one. and slightly nauseating. It captures something which a real piece of The most spell-binding expression of this club music, with its mechanical, digitally idea is in the grand orchestral work Tevot, a produced beat, never could. Nothing like it Hebrew word describing an ark. As the har- could ever issue from the fastidious pens of monies wheel downwards the music gathers Knussen or Benjamin. enormous heft and power. When it arrives What adds to its disturbing quality is the at a grinding climax of complication—as way it suddenly evaporates into piccolo and though the gears have finally seized up—the percussion flourishes, which in turn vanish sound is torn away, and a new spiral begins in into silence. It’s a typical example of the way the heights. Adès puts opposites side by side. Or—even The piece is vastly impressive in its more disturbingly—piles them one above unstoppable energy. It is also a superb met- the other, as he does in the weird moment aphor for the way music, in Adès’s vision, in the mini piano concerto entitled Concerto is condemned to be eternally on the move; Conciso. In that work the sinister bass writh- always searching for a point of rest and never ings in the piano are set against slow, beau- finding it. But by the same token it’s oppres- tifully glistening high strings. In these early sive. The music cannot break out of its own Crick Late: Discovery pieces, nothing is permitted to last long; process. It has to be rescued from an eter- Francis Crick Institute, London, it’s as if Adès wants to keep the music—and nity of spinning by an act of violence on the 3rd May the audience—in a state of suspense. This is part of the composer—a sudden silence or a The Francis Crick Institute, which opened in line with his stated vision of what music rude interruption. What Adès intended as last year near King’s Cross, is a £700m should be: “a captured eternal volatility.” a beautiful metaphor for the metaphysical temple to the biomedical sciences. And, He warms to composers who share that puzzle of music turns into something rather this month, Europe’s biggest super-lab, vision, like the Hungarian post-war mod- less beautiful: it’s as if the music were a per- which will host more than a thousand ernist Ligeti, whose startling confrontations son who cannot escape an obsession. scientists working in such fields as cancer of total opposites—a murmuring string tex- That feeling of being trapped in an genetics and immunology, throws its shiny glass doors open for the evening. ture followed by a sudden blaring outburst in enclosed world has surely influenced Adès’s The event will feature the obligatory the brass—are clearly the model for his own. choice of topoi. Two of his big orchestral food, drink and music but, with its theme He loves Janácˇek and Berlioz for the same scores are about enclosed spaces. In The of discovery, this is a rare chance to reason; but in their case eternal volatility is Tempest the outside world never intrudes. quiz world-leading scientists about their more to do with refusing to obey the norms And the dinner party scenario of The Exter- research projects, join workshops and try of harmony. This too finds an echo in Adès’s minating Angel is so perfectly attuned to some hands-on activities. delicate and moving moments of slightly Adès’s claustrophobic world it might almost blurry harmony, like the one that appears have been made for him. Securing the UK’s Future like a mirage amid the hectic complications This surely points to his limitation as an Industrial Success of the Piano Quintet. artist. For though he has achieved wondrous Society for Chemical Industry, London Beyond the unsettling, his music also things, he’s achieved them through music 23rd May tends in a completely different direction. He that spurns the middle ground in favour How should a post-Brexit UK rethink its describes composition both as “captured vol- of hallucinatory extremes. It is supremely industrial strategy in order to prosper in atility” and “the residue of an endless search intense but somehow thin. You could say this the future? David Willetts, former Minister for stability.” This search has led him in is the familiar dilemma of musical modern- for Science and Universities, sets out a recent years towards large-scale harmonic ism—one that no composer who avoids fac- policy road map at a public lecture hosted structures that underpin the hectic surface ile neo-romanticism can escape. And yet of by the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) variety. His fondness for opposites is rooted in all composers now living Adès could be the in central London. a tension deep in his nature. The Adès of the one to overcome it. Many things about his He will point out the need for the delicately expressive Violin Concerto of 2005 music—his embrace of old-fashioned tonal country to forge ahead on the Eight Great Technologies, previously identified by is very different to the Adès of the Chamber devices, his invocation of older music and the government as sectors in which the Symphony. The man too has changed. Gone his use of traditional media like the string country already enjoys advantages. These is the long-haired aesthete in white suits. quartet—suggest he is aware that the fruit- are: big data, satellites, robotics, modern Nowadays he dresses in workaday black; his ful ground lies near the centre. If he can find genetics, regenerative medicine, intense, stubbled face gazing suspiciously a way to cultivate that ground peacefully, agri-science, advanced materials and out in photographs. rather than mounting guerrilla raids on it energy storage. They will have impacts on The characteristic Adès sound of recent with works of super-complexity and crazily such diverse challenges as climate change years is of a harmonic movement in perpet- intense parody, he could become the great and feeding an ever-growing world popula- ual circling motion, but a circle that widens composer his gifts mean he ought to be. tion. Expect Willetts, chair of the British and deepens like a spiral. Typically we hear Ivan Hewett is classical music critic of the Science Association, to use his celebrated a bare two-note interval which accretes notes Daily Telegraph and Professor at the Royal two brains to champion science and in- and starts to shift up or down by semitonal College of Music. He is the author of “Music: novation as we wave our long goodbye to degrees. As this harmonic complex shifts, Healing the Rift” (Continuum) the EU.

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