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Concert
17 April 2007
Barbican Hall, London
Part of Traced Overhead - The Musical World of Thomas Ades
& part of Great Performers 2006-2007
Simon Keenlyside
Alexander Bader, clarinet
Markus Weidmann, bassoon
Stefan de Lavel Jezierski, horn
Wolfram Brandl, 1st violin
Christoph Streuli, 2nd violin
Micha Afkham, viola
Richard Duven, cello
Peter Riegelbauer, double bass
At the piano, Thomas Adès joins Berliner Philharmoniker’s Scharoun Ensemble in a performance of his Piano Quintet and baritone Simon Keenlyside joins the ensemble for a new octet version of Mahler’s sublime song cycle.
Programme
Beethoven: Piano in D major, Op 70, No 1 ‘Ghost’
Thomas Adès, piano
Wolfram Brandl, violin
Richard Duven, cello
Adès: Piano Quintet
Thomas Adès, piano
Wolfram Brandl, 1st violin
Christoph Streuli, 2nd violin
Micha Afkham, viola
Richard Duven, cello
Adès: Court Studies from The Tempest
Thomas Adès, piano
Alexander Bader, clarinet
Christoph Streuli, violin
Richard Duven, cello
Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), arranged by Andreas N Tarkmann.
I. Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht (When my sweetheart has her wedding)
II. Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld (Went this morning o’er the field)
III. Ich hab’ein glühend Messer (I have a glowing dagger)
IV. Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz (The two blue eyes of my darling girl)
What the critics say
Geoff Brown for The Times, April 19, 2007
Four out of five stars
Are we culturally dumbed down, too happy to be spoon-fed the easy option? On Tuesday evidence pointed the other way. The hall was full and buzzing. Audience concentration was intense, and woe betide a cougher. Yet on the stage stood no star gurgling pap. Instead, here were Thomas Adès and the excellent Scharoun Ensemble Berlin (a chamber offshoot of the Berlin Philharmonic), buckling down to more serious stuff in the Barbican’s compelling Adès series Traced Overhead .
Though not a star, it’s obvious that Adès has become a pied piper — a composer, pianist and conductor who can take an audience with him anywhere he wants. At first he took us to Beethoven, and the ghostliest performance of the Ghost piano trio. Even before the slow movement’s shivers, we’d become putty in the musicians’ hands, quivering over the teasing tension between piano and strings, dodging the bullets as the allegro ricocheted from abrupt fire to hushed hesitations. So that’s where the mercurial and jagged qualities in Adãs’s music come from: Beethoven!
Fascinating to jump from this Ghost to Adès’s single-span Piano Quintet, a work with its own 19th-century ghosts, structured as a cockeyed homage to classical sonata form. Or it might be a musical Rubik cube, with the obsessive juggling between two motifs — rising chords, a falling scale.
As usual the 20 minutes seemed a mite longer than necessary, thanks to the exposition section’s repeat. Yet through all the music’s glinting facets, the players’ clarity never wavered. Nor, after the interval, did clouds blanket the Court Studies from The Tempest , brilliant character miniatures from Adãs’s opera.
For the finale, another of Adès’s composing heroes, Mahler, took to the stage. Unfortunately, not for long: there are only four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen , and with Simon Keenlyside’s baritone we wanted at least eight. The second lure was the instrumental cushion, sensitively arranged by Andreas N. Tarkmann for five strings, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Which tugged the heart most: the lover’s cries, or the Scharouns’ bittersweet postludes? Very hard to say.
Richard Fairman for the Financial Times, April 18 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d206b91c-edc7-11db-8584-000b5df10621.html
Another change of costume: Thomas Adès’s wardrobe for his mini-festival “Traced Overhead” must be bulging, as this is a festival where he plays all the roles. Having already appeared as conductor, accompanist, solo pianist and more often than not composer, he turned on Tuesday to his latest part, performing as Adès the chamber musician.
The marvel is that he has hardly put a foot wrong. Perhaps as accompanist he overplayed a touch, at least for the intimate acoustics of St Luke’s Church, but back in the Barbican for this recital his contribution as pianist with members of the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin was sometimes almost too retiring.
The pianist in Beethoven’s “Ghost” Piano Trio usually likes to lead from the front, but Adès’s imaginative, atmospheric colourings in the background added an extra layer of mystery – the ghost’s presence causing a clammy chill through the subtly pedalled mists of the slow movement. There were some marvellously lambent sounds coming out of the piano part in Adès’s own Piano Quintet, too. Like Britten’s Death in Venice, soon to be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival, where Adès is artistic director, the Quintet shows how beauty can lead to chaos and so be changed beyond recognition. In the hands of the Scharoun Ensemble the music almost felt mesmerising in its elusive radiance.
Working on his Shakespearian opera The Tempest obviously left Adès with some unfinished business, as the year after he followed up with a sequence of instrumental vignettes called Court Studies from “The Tempest”. The characters who arrive on Prospero’s island are here deftly sketched in six short movements. Each is a brilliant little study that makes much of little.
The final item – Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in a chamber arrangement by Andreas N. Tarkmann – was less convincing. Simon Keenlyside sang with vivid personality, but his usually sure baritone sounded ill at ease at both high and low extremes, and Tarkmann’s arrangement was fussily over-written. Adès could tell him a thing or two about economy of means.
He plays the piano too
Barry Millington for the Evening Standard, 18 April 2007
Four out of five stars (Barry Millington)
Five out of five stars (Reader rating)
Thomas Adès showed he is equally compelling as composer and pianist in the penultimate concert of his festival, Traced Overhead.
With the excellent Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, he opened with Beethoven's Piano Trio in D major, Op70 No1 (The Ghost), that presaged the eponymous ectoplasmic presence of the Largo with a breathtakingly spectral passage in the first movement. The latter in fact embraced both Classical manners (though with warmly expansive playing from Adès especially) and something altogether more elusive, as though to forge a link with Adès's own Piano Quintet that followed.
This fuses a Beethovenian cell, a two-chord iambic figure, a Ligeti-like ethereality and a rhythmic complexity worthy of Adès's idol Conlon Nancarrow. Though drained of expressive or lyrical thematic content as such, this one-movement quintet impresses with its astonishingly resourceful transformations of frankly unpromising material. The ensemble wove textures of exquisite finesse and negotiated the formidable metrical hurdles with skill.
A different instrumental grouping delivered the Court Studies from Adès's The Tempest with equal dexterity, while an octet gave Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in Andreas Tarkmann's imaginative scoring with impeccably calibrated blending and balance.
Simon Keenlyside brought a theatrical immediacy to "I Have a Glowing Dagger", but his head voice for higher tessitura did not always behave, on this occasion, as reliably as he might have wished.
Extracts from a review by Rob Witts for Classicalsource.com
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=4409
“…Less cerebral was Court Studies, a little collection of characterful miniatures extracted from his recent opera “The Tempest”. Scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet, Court Studies shows Adès's more directly expressive side, particularly in the concluding passacaglia; his sensitivity to harmony and colour is suggested by the gradual fade at the end, the last two chords represented by the same note played on different strings of the violin.
For Mahler's “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”, Simon Keenlyside stood in the centre of a horseshoe of musicians, his voice emerging from within their rich sound. Keenlyside is a superbly poetic singer, and inhabited the heady emotional atmosphere of the songs; if his upper register was not quite on top form, this was forgotten as he gazed upwards at the falling flowers of the Lindenbaum. In Andreas N. Tarkmann's clever arrangement, the musicians of the Scharoun Ensemble provided the perfect foil, creating a world of ambiguous beauty.”
Erica Jeal for The Guardian,
April 21, 2007
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/reviews/story/0,,2062434,00.html
Four out of five stars
“…Adès was again at the piano for his elegant Court Studies from The Tempest, before Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer found him joining the audience to hear from his Prospero, baritone Simon Keenlyside. Keenlyside is perhaps not the obvious choice for a cycle which, in the key of this octet arrangement at least, takes his voice uncomfortably high. But the protagonist of these songs is not a comfortable man. The churning opening of the third song was where we most missed Mahler's rich orchestral sonorities, but as the song reached its climax, the desperate intensity of Keenlyside's delivery, combined with the edginess of the instrumentation, gave the song a rawness that made it devastating.”