Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in L.A. - Ad�s, Kurt�g, Castiglioni

Thomas Ad�s completed his residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a Green Umbrella concert Tuesday night, a concert showing Ad�s as composer, as conductor, and as pianist. As composer, the concert gave us a survey of three works showing his development from Opus 2 in 1990 (at age 19) to Opus 20 in 2001. Indeed, as originally programmed the concert was to have begun with a fourth work, his Opus 1 from 1989, Five Eliot Landscapes for soprano and piano; that work, however, had to be cancelled because the singer was ill.

The Chamber Symphony, Op. 2 showed Ad�s as a talented, confident, rather showy composer displaying his virtuosity in writing for 15 instruments and taking Webern-like modernism (without Webern�s simplicity) and applying the techniques to the forms of the classic symphony. The work has a little bit of everything, including a central part for the basset clarinet and a supporting role for the accordion. It�s sort of a �Look, Ma, no hands!� kind of piece. In its American premiere, Opus 13, The Origin of the Harp (1994) shows the then 23-year old Ad�s working with much more thought and control, working much harder to communicate musical ideas to an audience. The title was taken from a painting showing the transformation of a water nymph into a Celtic harp and is written for three clarinets, three violas and three cellos; a compositional challenge was to suggest a harp at the end of the work.

The Piano Quintet, Op. 20 is a mature work, and it is impressive. The Arditti Quartet, who gave the premiere with Ades at the piano, has recorded the work, pairing it with the Schubert Trout. The Ades quintet holds its own. You can listen to clips of the quintet here. The quintet is firmly based on classical forms; from that foundation, however, it plays with tempo and meter in unconventional, idiosynchratic ways. The four strings from the Phil did an excellent job, and the composer/pianist presented himself as sensitive, responsive member of a team, not using the piano (and his own playing skills) to take over and direct.

For the program, Ad�s supplemented his music with works for soprano and chamber players by Gy�rgy Kurt�g and Niccol� Castiglioni. While the particular works might have been initially chosen because the Eliot Landscapes used a soprano, Ad�s seemed to be commenting on his own works as well: all three composers represented in the program brought contemporary, modern sensibilities to traditional forms, working to link the past to the present. The first half of the program closed with Kurt�g�s Scenes from a Novel, Op. 19 (1982) for soprano, violin, bass, and cimbalom. Kurt�g used 15 short poems by Rimma Dalos, some as short and compressed as haikus, to present a spectrum of feelings and colors in a typical Kurt�g range or musical pictures, some with humor but with an overall feeling of loss and regret.

Castiglioni�s Part 1 of Cantus Planus (1990) uses the �plain song� approaches of medieval and northern renaissance music with a 12-tone musical vocabulary. The work is for two sopranos and chamber septet (flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, percussion --- and harp); it presents twelve rhymed couplets by Silesius, a poet-priest of the 1600s. This was also the first U.S. performance of the work; a recording on Stradivarius is shown on Amazon as being no longer available. Elizabeth Keusch, a young soprano from Boston, flew in as a rapid replacement for the ill soprano; she had previously sung both the Kurtag and the Castiglioni works. This was her third appearance at a Green Umbrella concert; she has a lovely, strong voice, good technique, and excellent pitch (supported in the Castiglioni by discreet use of the tuning fork, since the first soprano role in that work is challenging and tremendously exposed).

posted by Jerry Zinser 2/22/2006