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Adès: Asyla; Tevot; Polaris CD review – sheer mastery, vividly realised

Irresistible beauty … Thomas Adès at work.
Irresistible beauty … Thomas Adès at work. Photograph: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Though they were conceived independently and intended as standalone pieces, Thomas Adès’s three large-scale orchestral works to date form a trilogy of sorts. All of them have the heft and range of symphonic arguments and, composed across 14 years from the mid-1990s onwards, they also provide an orchestral timeline through Adès’s development as a composer and the way his musical preoccupations have shifted. It’s by no means a comprehensive guide – the three operas, Powder Her Face, The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, inevitably offer an alternative, parallel perspective – but the journey from the brittleness and brilliance of Asyla, which Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony introduced in 1997, to the majestic harmonic rotations of Polaris, composed for the New York Philharmonic in 2010, is an utterly compelling one.

The centrepiece of this triptych is Tevot, the enigmatic single movement Adès wrote for Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007. It’s always seemed a strangely open-ended piece to me, as if the point at which the music stops is almost provisional. Here, in this LSO performance under the composer in which not a single scrap of the scoring seems to be overlooked, it is followed by Polaris, which brings a much more sure sense of closure. Tevot’s irresistible weight and beauty, its shining descents and dark upwellings, the flaring Janáček-like trumpet writing and Mahlerian wistfulness, can be appreciated for what they are, and they combine with an absolute refusal to rush or take any shortcuts through the musical argument. It’s a score that knows the space and time it needs, and its pacing is totally sure.

If Tevot is the real revelation here, 20 years on it’s also good to be reminded of the very different brilliance of Asyla, and how fresh that still sounds. As a first large-scale orchestral score, its assurance is dazzling. The three pieces do share extra-musical associations too – their titles evoke notions of safe havens and the ways of finding them – but what links them more importantly is the sheer mastery of their orchestral writing, as this recording from the Barbican shows so vividly.