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Thomas Adès: Violin Concerto "Concentric Paths" - Canadian premiere

Thomas Adès was born on March 1, 1971, in London, England, where he now resides. He composed the Violin Concerto in 2005 as a joint commission by the Berliner Festspiele and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The composer led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the world première on September 4, 2005, with Anthony Marwood as the soloist. The work runs approximately 20 minutes in performance, and is scored for solo violin, 2 flutes,2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, and orchestral strings.

Thomas Adès was just out of his teens when critics began hailing him as the Promising New Voice of British music. Yet he managed to avoid the painful identity crisis that sometimes accompanies the transition from Wunderkind to maturity. Not unlike the Prospero he portrays in his operatic setting of The Tempest—an immensely successful Covent Garden commission that premiered in 2004—Adès has learned to tame the maelstrom of energies churning through his earlier scores. At the same time, his work of recent years seems to enrich the composer’s unassailable gifts for color, lyricism, and jump-cutting excitement with a more sustained, humane coherence.

The Violin Concerto of 2005 was Adès’s first major work to follow The Tempest. While it echoes some aspects of that opera’s musical world, the concerto introduces a certain austerity which Adès has continued to integrate into his vocabulary. The concerto’s relatively brief span (about twenty minutes) is characteristically deceptive. His style tends to convey a high density of musical thought per square inch. Every detail that Adès packs into this score requires extraordinary concentration and dexterity from the soloist.

On the surface, the concerto follows the familiar format of three movements, according to the standard fast-slow-fast pattern. But Adès alters the expected sense of linear trajectory to tweak expectations. The central movement occupies the center of gravity. It not only lasts slightly longer than the outer two movements combined but is the emotional heart around which they revolve. This is the largest of the circular patterns on which Adès bases the concerto, which bears the subtitle Concentric Paths (a tongue-in-cheek archaism whose imagery conjures the music of the spheres). Each of the movements also proceeds according to its own circular design, as the composer points out. The notion of "concentric paths" in itself might describe the larger aesthetic at work in Adès’s musical universe. His scores abound in multiple impulses that circulate around each other, counterbalancing the centrifugal with the centripetal.

Adès names the three movements “Rings,” “Paths,” and “Rounds.” “Rings” unfolds as a series of restless rustlings and punctuations—an impatient perpetuum mobile against a wavering background of harmonically shifting sands or, as the composer describes it, “sheets of unstable harmony in different orbits.” The violin’s predominantly high perch is a characteristic of this concerto’s soundscape, although its origins might be traced to the otherworldly, high-wire coloratura Adès assigns to his soprano Ariel in The Tempest. The restlessly shifting background meanwhile effects the sensation of an uneasy, slow-motion fall through gravity-less space. Toward the end, intermittent, brusque attacks from percussion and brass increase in menace and bring the movement to a sudden halt.

“Paths” alludes to the gravely gripping lament of a Baroque chaconne, based on repetitions of its opening sequence. But the mood is a far cry from Baroque stateliness. Adès describes the movement as involving “two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution.” He plays extremities of texture off each other to generate the movement’s seismic, grinding, relentless energy. The slow tempo only heightens an underlying sense of foreboding. The violin successively overlaps with the ensemble in the center of “Paths,” only to be reduced, by the end, to bare, throaty murmurings in its lowest range.

Relaxation at last arrives in the playful “Rounds”—despite the somewhat sinister orchestration of its opening gestures. From a rhythmically catchy, riff-like tune, “Rounds” plays out, as Adès notes, “with stable cycles moving in harmony at different rates.” Jauntily syncopated fiddling dissipates the opaque tensions that have accumulated. The soloist’s limber pleasure is disarming, unperturbed by the cycles orbiting around her. She even occasionally joins in the fray, as in the spiraling high jinks that abruptly round off the concerto.

This note is adapted from a version originally published by the San Francisco Symphony.

--Thomas May is a contributor to the Toronto Symphony programmes and writes frequently on music and theatre.

Programme Note by Thomas May

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