Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Adès, Hodges, and members of the LA Philharmonic
Photo : mine 2008

The L.A. Philharmonic is sending the season out with a bang this week. The final shows this weekend will feature the local premiere of Salonen’s Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman. But before that auspicious event was another big show - Thomas Adès followed up last week’s François Couperin love-fest with an evening of his own works including the U.S. Premiere of a new work, In Seven Days, with a video component designed by Tal Rosner.

But first there was old-fashioned music without video. The show opened with Arcadiana, a string quartet from 1994 in seven movements brimming with various musical and artistic references. Many of these deal with themes of water or land, which made a nice prelude to the to the latter part of the program where God gets about making the distinction between these two in the first place. The piece was played quite capably and very seriously by the Calder Quartet who released a new CD featuring this as well as other works today. This was followed by another work from the same year, Living Toys, for a small ensemble with piano and percussion. The same work was included in Adès’ Zankel Hall appearances earlier this year with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. I must admit that I was even more taken with tonight’s version, which sounded both fantastic and exciting in the hands of the L.A. Philharmonic players. It was a big winner that got a substantial pre-intermission ovation from the substantial crowd.

Of course, all of this was prelude to In Seven Days a co-commission from the LA Philharmonic and London’s Southbank Centre where it received its world premiere on April 28 this year. The work is a sort-of piano concerto that concerns, you guessed it, the Biblical tale of the creation of the earth. The work is accompanied by a six-channel video designed by Adès' domestic partner, Tal Rosner. Whether or not this personal and professional collaboration is the harbinger of a pairing along the lines of Britten and Pears as opposed to Madonna and Penn has yet to be determined. But there was plenty to be excited about tonight and overall it appears the future is more likely to be promising than not. The work's movements blend together and closely follow the traditional Genesis story. The music is pretty, accessible, and frequently rhythmic lending itself well to the moniker of “video-ballet” used by its creators. Nicolas Hodges was the piano soloist and, while he was solid, this work is not about flashy virtuoso maneuvers and the piano seldom stands out apart from the rest of the action.

Adès, Hodges, and Rosner
Photo : mine 2008

Video-accompaniment can be a risky business and it’s much to Rosner’s credit that his contribution is both attractive and very professional looking. This is a town that knows video and while this isn’t Bill Viola, it’s not shabby either. Rosner owes much more to early 20th century artists who experimented with music and visual images and people such as Oskar Fischinger than he does to any of his contemporaries. His work takes photographs and digital video and processes them with a modicum of computer wizardry. Nothing is ever completely recognizable, and the remnants have a kinetic sense closely timed with the composition.

The work received a big standing ovation and while I was sad to see it end and could have easily tolerated another 30 minutes or more, if I have any criticism it’s that the whole thing seemed a bit prosaic. God creates the stars and the piano tinkles away in the high register while little white dots of various sizes flash on the screen. God creates the sun and there you have a giant yellow-kaleidoscope. Still In Seven Days continues to suggest Adès’ growth as a composer. He continues to display a sense of the theatric and an appreciation of the collaborative process that makes one eager to see what’s next from him. And that may be the most exciting thing of all.

Labels: LA Philharmonic 07/08, Thomas Ades

Thomas Adès, Ariana Ghez, and Bruce Hudson
Photo : mine 2008

Is it wrong to have a schoolboy crush on a composer? OK, well, how about a sustained artistic admiration? I’ll admit I’ve developed rather a high opinion of Thomas Adès over the last several years through his many visits to Los Angeles that seems to grow with each new encounter of his work. Wednesday continued that tradition with the first of two appearances he will make at WDCH with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

So, how cool is this. In the midst of the Philharmonic’s “Baroque Variations” series, which typically features touring ensembles playing the usual Vivaldi, Handel, and the like, in pops Mr. Adès who throws all the usual trappings out the window to devote an entire evening to his own preoccupation with the work of French composer François Couperin. Adès accomplished this in two segments. In the first half of the program he played his own arrangements of Coperin’s works enlisting the help of the superb Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. These works clearly retained Couperin’s baroque melodies, but the structure and attack were radically altered with the orchestra divided into two halves passing the lines back and forth both in cooperative and at times oppositional fashion. The brief pieces suddenly felt amplified and alive in ways one might not typically expect from music of this period, but it was still clearly identifiable and very playful and amusing. The first half concluded with a work of Adès’ own, Sonata da caccia, completed when he was only 23 and intended as a cheeky homage to Couperin. Adès played the harpsichord himself with Ariana Ghez on oboe and Bruce Hudson on French horn. Again the quirky effect of a decidedly modern take on these Baroque forms was not only whimsical and amusing but rather insightful.

Thomas Adès and Tal Rosner
Photo : Clara Molden 2008

For the second half of the program, the games were put on hold as Adès shared Couperin’s music with the audience in its original format just as he himself enjoys it, by his report from the stage, everyday in his own home. Le Parnasse, ou L'apothéose de Corelli was followed by Troisième leçon de ténèbres which featured vocals by local talents Elissa Johnston and Christine Brandes. I think it is always exciting to see living composers talk about and perform the music that excites and inspires them. This is part of why Salonen is such a great conductor and Adès was clearly having fun as well. As with his recent appearances in New York, Adès prefaced these works with comments from the stage, about his own admiration for Couperin and what his own understanding of these compositions were. He was witty, unassuming and downright charming throughout. Adès will be back next week for a program of his own works including the U.S. premiere of a new commission, In Seven Days, a collaboration with video artist and Adès’ partner Tal Rosner, which recently debuted in London to generally positive reviews. Not to be missed.

Labels: LA Philharmonic 07/08, Thomas Ades

Adès maxing and relaxing

A bewildering amount of publicity surrounded the Metropolitan Opera at the end of last week for events that really seem more markers of failure than success to my eyes. The house finally delivered on a Tristan und Isolde with the cast it used to advertise a series of performances for the last show of the run on Friday and the following night managed to inspire some people to travel from half a world away to see probably the most tired opera imaginable, La Bohème, in a woefully out-of-date production with a cast that has sung it before, better, and elsewhere. Will wonders never cease?

So it should be no surprise that my week in New York ended on an entirely different and more forward-looking front with two excellent shows in Zankel Hall, featuring the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under the baton of British composer Thomas Adès. We here in LA are no strangers to Adès’ compositions but seeing him again in such an intimate setting was a real pleasure. The first night featured a concert performance of Gerald Barry’s chamber opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit in a reprise of an excellent outing of the same work in LA in 11/06. At least two of the cast from that prior event, Christopher Lemmings as Beauty and Stephen Wallace as Pleasure returned in Barry’s high-intensity tongue-twister. It was again rousing, if a little less refined, in the confines of Zankel, compared to the WDCH, but the argument for Barry’s work on this side of the Atlantic came across clearly to the receptive audience. You can also read more on the very excellent, but sadly under-attended show here.

Saturday saw a program of Adès own compositions as part of the “Making Music” series where the performances, led by the composer himself—who also played piano when called for—are accompanied with brief conversation between the composer and host Ara Guzelimian. The program consisted mostly of some of Adès earliest compositions from the 90s including Op. 1 Five Eliot Landscapes for piano and soprano, Op. 2 Chamber Symphony and its successor Living Toys from 1993. That the earliest of these compositions were submitted when Adès was a student for competitions and that they continue to offer a myriad of joys and excitement is remarkable. This is especially true when the composer in question is under 40. Adès himself was witty and charming on the stage, reminiscing at one point that prior to setting the five T.S. Eliot poems for his Op. 1, he had begun to set The Hollow Men for full orchestra and 30 percussionists. He slyly noted that this alone may have doomed the project after the first stanza.

The highlight of the show for me personally, though, was the brief 8 minute Court Studies from The Tempest, which consisted of brief pieces of incidental music he composed as part of the revision of his second opera based on Shakespeare’s play. This was a brief snippet of the dark and beautiful music making up one of the first major operas of the new century and it was all too short for this evening. However, it is this very music that reminds us that things may be looking up for New York’s storied opera house as Peter Gelb has already announced plans to program The Tempest for the 2011-2012 season. Funny how things change.

Labels: Music Reviews 07/08, Thomas Ades