THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR COMPOSER’S NOTE the same musical stuff, as if each were a THE CHAMBER MUSIC OF THOMAS ADÈS (b. 1971) different view through a kaleidoscope. ‘Six of Nearly twenty years separate the two string the seven titles’, he has noted, ‘evoke quartets on this record, and all I have been able various vanished or vanishing “idylls”. The Piano Quintet (2001) * to discover over this time is that music only gets odd-numbered are all aquatic, and would splice 1 I [11.43] more and more mysterious. I am very grateful if played consecutively.’ 2 II [4.35] for this enjoyable collaboration to Signum, Tim 3 III [3.00] Oldham, Steve Long at Floating Earth, and my In the first movement the viola is a gondolier friends the Calder Quartet. poling through the other instruments’ moonlit The Four Quarters (2011) World Premiere Recording 4 I. Nightfalls [7.06] water, with shreds of shadowy waltz drifting 5 II. Serenade: Morning Dew [3.12] Thomas Adès, 2015 in now and then. Next, under a quotation 6 III. Days [3.50] from The Magic Flute (‘That sounds so 7 IV. The Twenty-Fifth Hour [3.51] The Chamber Music delightful, that sounds so divine’ sing of Thomas Adès Monostatos and the slaves when Papageno Arcadiana (1993) plays his bells), comes a song for the cello 8 I. Venezia notturno [2.39] These three works are not only in classic under glistening harmonics. The music is 9 II. Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schon [1.22] genres but themselves becoming classics, with stopped twice in its tracks by major chords, 0 III. Auf dem Wasser zu singen [2.35] Arcadiana as close as any modern quartet to and slips away whistling something from the q IV. Et...(tango mortale) [3.53] joining the repertory. The Calders included it Mozart score. ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ w V. L’Embarquement [2.34] on their debut album, between the Ravel (To be Sung on the Water) takes its title and a e VI. O Albion [3.27] and Mozart’s last quartet, and have played it figuration from a Schubert song, though here r VII. Lethe [2.27] often since. They have also been proponents of the song is Adès’s own, over which water the Piano Quintet, with Gloria Cheng, and were seems to be falling in drops, with increasing Total timings: [56.17] the second team to play The Four Quarters, antagonism between the elements. within a few months of its première. The tango centrepiece – the non-idyll – relates CALDER QUARTET Adès wrote Arcadiana in 1993 and gave it to Poussin’s paintings in which shepherds in a THOMAS ADÈS PIANO * a favourite form, of several sound pictures, classical landscape make out the inscription distinct and characterful, being drawn out of on a tomb: ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, which could be www.signumrecords.com - 3 - understood as voiced by the deceased (I too all engaged in the one unfolding process. (rising) turns into another (falling), but it treble, from which a slow descent completes was in Arcadia) or by Death (Even in Arcadia There is a strong invitation to understand remains a crux right through the piece. The the exposition. I am there). Like those paintings, Adès’s that process in terms of sonata form, with an violin tries several approaches to it before Arcadian sequence at once beguiles and exposition that is even repeated, followed by gaining access to a new, higher world of Development starts with the piano tackling threatens, not least here, in what is its development and recapitulation. Beneath this regular quavers, which is where the piano the first subject as the strings pursue their longest section. Still in the Louvre, the guise the music is in constant evolution (as comes in, obliged to do so at a lower level (B, own course. Emphatic crescendos then carry following movement relates to Watteau’s is indeed very often the case in Beethoven or to the violin’s initial C), and then the trio the music towards a sequence of force and ‘L’Embarquement pour Cythère’ (Boarding for Schubert); it is also far from classical norms enters lower still, at B flat. Thus the music astonishing ordered complexity, where the Cythera, an island sacred to Aphrodite) and in its texture, much of it being composed in builds itself from the top down, and the three strings are all independent of the piano’s changes darkness to light, with high cadences layers that, though they certainly act on one layers are also proceeding in different metres. common time and of each other, careering and song phrases turning into water music another, follow independent courses set by through time signatures such as 4/5 (four that splashes out from Debussy’s response to their own harmonic and metrical guidelines. The texture begins to fall apart and is quintuplet crotchets to the bar) or 1/7, as well the same picture, L’Isle joyeuse. From Venice, brusquely set aside for a ticking machine in the as more regular measures. When this has Vienna and Paris, ‘O Albion’ comes to England So it is at the start, a kind of non-fugue in strings over rumbling piano, from which the settled down attention turns to the second for a meditation on ‘Nimrod’ from Elgar’s which the first violin, the piano and the second subject emerges in the form of subject, and soon the strings assume Enigma Variations. (The first performance remaining string trio enter in turn with what beautiful harmonic exchanges between strings responsibility alone, through harmonic terrain of Arcadiana was given at the Cambridge is partly the same material – a scalewise rise and piano, now metrically aligned. These that moves from the darkly rich to the tensely Elgar Festival.) Lethe, in Greek mythology, is of three chords and then a descent through a progressions gradually come to crystallize glistening (violins and viola only, sul tasto the river of forgetting, as Adès remembers in different scale in quicker notes – and partly into a song in A major on the piano, sounding and without vibrato). the trajectory of his cello song, taken up by not, for each new entry has to adapt to a as if it might be a quotation from Brahms, the other instruments and gradually lost. constantly altering environment, which itself though Adès’s model was the second subject As the strings come to buzzing rest on and seems to come out of the slightly wonky from the opening movement of Beethoven’s around middle B flat, the piano returns, and His Piano Quintet of 2001 is in some ways harmonies and the rhythmic skid of the basic ‘Pastoral’ Sonata, to which he was drawn before long the broken chords of the opening quite different, not sectional and scenic but a idea. As Adès puts it, the violin goes two for its initial instability and because ‘the are back. The recapitulation is compact, and continuous, abstract span. It is, however, as steps down a corridor and, at the third, finds whole movement feels like one long organic includes a delectable C majorish passage full of striking imagery as its predecessor, and a door that will not open: F, the first stopped process’. His own continues with developments with string harmonics before the final sometimes of similar imagery: tightly worked note on the violin’s top string, one of the of the song leading to downward scales seesawing ends on an upbeat. cascades in the high treble, interlocked textures instrument’s ‘roughest’ notes, ‘the grit in the that have each instrument in its own rhythm, coming undone, a moment of repose, but now oyster’. Here it is the point where one harmony and so to a magical uprush into the high - 4 - - 5 - The Four Quarters (2011) returns to the now identifiable as stars, are still there at fortissimo chords on the nagging thirteen-beat Arcadian model of brilliant evocation by means the darkening close. rhythm. Then quiet again, the music unwinds. of tight construction, the central metaphor this time being the diurnal cycle. ‘Nightfalls’, All the remaining movements are shorter, Finally, ‘The Twenty-Fifth Hour’, in a time the first movement, opens on two planes, the ‘Morning Dew’ being emphatically the scherzo, outside time, restores high-treble lustre and violins playing harmonics in a regular pattern mostly pizzicato. Though Adès in this work dance, the time signature of 25/16 being divided of short-short-long while the viola and cello maintains the same time signatures in all into groups of 8+3+8+6. Now one may feel are in harmony, far below and slower. These parts, the four instruments are on their own not only that the violin-harmonic image from planes are utterly distinct, and yet they tracks through stretches of this movement, the first movement is back but that it has seem not only to complement but also to now and then arriving at the same spot with grown into a bright melody, spinning in resemble one another, in that the intervals some surprise, but then happily joining in a changing harmonic currents, resolving at times on which the violins keep hesitating are also bit of ostinato. The second time this happens, into scales, speeding up, reaching into a passage those with and towards which the lower the first violin goes off into bowed playing, of magnificent triadic harmony, slowing down instruments grope. More than that, the followed by the others, still otherwise again and coming to stillness on a D major scintillant anapaest that the violins go on independent, but they cannot get the old music chord so beautiful it just has to be repeated.