or Store Classical Music
Thomas Adès - Piano
Leos Janacek, Igor Stravinsky, Ferruccio Busoni, Gyorgy Kurtag, Niccolo Castiglioni, Alexey Vladimirovich Stanchinsky, Edvard Grieg, Conlon Nancarrow, Thomas Adès
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #189483 in Music
- Released on: 2000-11-21
- Number of discs: 1
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
To some, he's the dazzling prince-elect of the new-music scene; to others, he's the spoiled brat decked out in an entire wardrobe of the emperor's new clothes--and each side seems to preach to the converted. Well, whatever your take on the music of young British composer Thomas Adès, who has already written full-scale works in a stunning array of genres--from the sensitive cycle Five Eliot Landscapes to the opéra du scandale Powder Her Face and the symphony Asyla--give yourself an unprejudiced listen to Adès as performer on the recital album Piano and you'll discover yet another dimension to the musical world inhabited by the young upstart--one that holds manifold surprising delights. The most obvious is, of course, the choice of program--and kudos to EMI for backing the bold choices Adès has made--which flies against the current trend toward cozy familiarity or, at best, a mixture of chestnuts with scary unknowns. Not that this is "scary" modern music; instead, it's a gracious, beguiling manifesto for the art of the piano miniature, in modernist, postmodernist, neoclassical, even late-romantic guises. Even the familiar composers are represented by obscure works: some peasant dances of Grieg, some motley pages of little-known Stravinsky, a sonatina of Busoni.
A lot of the fun here is in allowing yourself to discover some of the gems you'll very likely never have heard before: the personality-drenched, enigmatic, Paul Klee-like "games" of Kurtág (one of Adès's early mentors) and--most of all--Alexey Stanchinsky's completely enthralling Piano Sonata No. 2, which also happens to be the longest work here, though the varying senses of time each piece unravels become positively Einsteinian as the program progresses. Adès is like a kid in a candy shop, sharing his enthusiasm with each discovery--it's the perfect merger of personalities between performer and composer. He doesn't play pyrotechnical showoff, even in the head-spinning dual-tempo feats of the Nancarrow canons concluding the disc. Rather, he seems more interested in inviting his audience to participate in each given world. Technique with insouciant energy and boundless humor--the entire recital is a blast. --Thomas May
Customer Reviews
A surprisingly successful collection of lesser-known works
The English composer Thomas Adès has been heavily promoted by EMI as the Great White Hope of British music, but his piano playing has received less attention than his composition (even though he is a former winner of the BBC's televised Young Musician of the Year). This disc is his first as pianist, and shows his eclectic range of interests, featuring lesser-known works by well-known composers (Grieg, Stravinsky, Janácek), pieces by unjustly neglected composers (Castiglioni, Stanchinsky, Busoni) and a couple of contemporary classics (Kurtág, Nancarrow).
Niccolò Castiglioni is a composer grievously underrepresented on disc, and thus any recordings of music by this eclectic Italian postmodernist are highly welcome. Adès chooses to play the composer's lighthearted suite Como io passo l'estate, a ten-minute collection of ten comparatively simple miniatures that ranges from witty neoclassicism to icy tone clusters. It's all done with a very winning lightness of touch common to much of Castiglioni's music, which raises the music above the level of so many descriptive piano suites.
Grieg's Slatter is a collection of pieces based on Telemark fiddle tunes, which the composer sought to gentrify in a piano arrangement. Fortunately, the composer has managed here to create compositions which are lively, entertaining and interesting despite a certain lack of fidelity to the original model. Adès chooses to play three of the nineteen, which is probably a wise choice as I imagine hearing all nineteen would become rather tiresome. The performance here lacks a little in lightness of touch and rhythmic vibrancy, but still brings across the essence of the pieces adequately.
Alexey Stanchinsky was one of the more extraordinary figures of early 20th-century Russian music. Declared incurably insane at twenty and dead, probably by his own hand, six years later, he left behind a small but intriguing corpus of contrapuntally intense music that lies somewhere in the huge space between Bach and mid-period Scriabin. Probably the most extraordinary of all his works is the Canon for four voices (the finest of his five Preludes in Canonic Form), a tour-de-force of contrapuntal writing that manages to combine immensely lyrical writing with strict imitative counterpoint. Also very fine is the Second Sonata, whose slow, intense first movement fugue is contrasted with a vigorous, toccata-like finale. Adès tends to rush the contrapuntal movements a little, and Nikolai Fefilov's more spacious and authentically Russian-sounding recording on Etcetera (still available from some Amazon sites) remains a first choice for both works. (Adès' performance of the Second Sonata is, however, superior to the rather pedestrian Daniel Blumenthal on Marco Polo.)
These days, György Kurtág's eclectic brand of modernism needs little introduction, and selections from his career-spanning collection of piano miniatures, Játékok, have become common features of recitals of contemporary piano music. Adès selects eight pieces in all, and though I might quibble with his inclusion of three rather childish parodies (the two Hommages and The mad girl with the flaxen hair) it's always good to hear more from this collection.
The Janácek selection is a brief one-minute squib, included, I assume, as a taster for Adès' songs-and-piano-music collection with Ian Bostridge, and not nearly as interesting as Busoni's Third Sonatina "ad usum infantis." An essay in simple, almost naïve classicism, this sequence of five brief, related movements has far more depth to it than appears on the surface. Adès' reading is appropriately intimate in scale and tone.
Three Stravinsky miniatures from the 1910s follow: Souvenir d'une marche boche is a swaggering, parodistic march, Valse pour les enfants a simple, neo-classical waltz and Piano-Rag-music an over-the-top rhythmic essay that has rather less to do with ragtime than the title might suggest.
The disc ends with Conlon Nancarrow's Three Canons for Ursula. These are late works, written after the composer had finally found interpreters who could do justice to the rhythmic complexities of his music (much of his previous work had been études for player piano). The first two canons are comparatively slow with complex, flowing rhythms somewhat indebted to jazz. The first has the two hands in tempo ratios of seven-to-five and the complex second is a four-part canon in ratios six-to-nine-to-ten-to-fifteen. In contrast, the rhythmically simpler (two-to-three) finale is a coruscating virtuoso tour-de-force.
This is a fascinating disc, and even though not all of the music here is of the highest standard there is still much to enjoy from composers both familiar and unfamiliar. If Adès' pianism is not up to bringing all the works off with equal success, this is probably in part due to the sheer variety of his musical interests and it should not take off the shine from what is a surprisingly successful collection.
Unfamiliar but highly listenable modern classical piano work
First, it's easy to recognize Thomas Ades as a master interpreter of 20th century piano classics. And it is a full span of the 20th century from the 1902-03 Norwegian Dances to Castiglioni's "How I Spend The Summer" by a composer only a year my senior, and Gyorgy Kurtag's "Jatekok".
The concert starts with Castiglioni's "How I Spend The Summer", a work that can be played by very young piano students, but is a delight to adult ears, with its mixed and playful moods.
That is immediately followed by Grieg's challenging Norwegian Peasant Dances, partly graceful and partly powerful and untamed melody and rhythm.
Neo-classicist Alexey Stanchinsky's four-part Canon and his Piano Sonata in G are extraordinary works which have been described as Bach on the left hand and Scriabin on the right. A pity this brilliant talent lived such a pitifully short lifetime.
As noted by another reviewer, the Kurtag work is a delight and very much to be listened to carefully to catch the playful allusions to Debussy, Tschaikowsky, Janacek, and (catch this) Nancy Sinatra.
Janacek's music, like Grieg's, is pure folk, composed by Janacek and played by Ades as folk without classical pretensions.
Ades continues with works by Busoni and Stravinsky, concluding with Nancarrow, another composer like Kurtag who was wildly original and humorous, apparantly matched only by Ades who performs them in like spirit.
This CD can be an introduction to modern classics, or an addition to an advanced collection. In either case, this music will be new to most listeners, and is bound to be a delight.
A composer pianist's insights.
Thomas Adès is certainly among the most original and compelling composers in today's public eye. In this recording, he demonstrates how a composer with the requisite performing skills can illuminate music in ways that might elude the "mere" performing virtuoso. But make no mistake, Adès is no mean pianist: The musical world first noticed him as a pianist when he took Second Prize in the 1989 BBC Young Musician of the Year contest.
This free-ranging recital includes no virtuoso showpieces. And most (if not all of) the pieces will be unfamiliar to most listeners. But each of them has a compelling musical purpose that Adès finds and places on display for our listening pleasure. Even the juxtaposition of pieces in the recital serves this end.
Special mention should be made of Adès' performances of the Kurtag and Nancarrow pieces. The Kurtag miniatures, from his "Playing Games" are filled with wonderful humor and poignancy that Adès obviously relishes. (Check out "The Mad Girl with the Flaxen Hair", an hommage to Debussy.) These "simple", short works are rarely performed on or off record; the current disc may be worth hearing for them alone.
The Nancarrow canons are outrageously original and slyly humorous takes on this ancient form. While not "virtuoso music", they are nearly impossible to play! But Adès does play them -- and in a way that upstages their dedicatee, Ursula Oppens (whose performance of two of them is available on another five-star disc: Music & Arts CD-4862). While Oppens seems to understand where the music is going and is a fine guide, Adès conveys the sense of knowing why the music goes where it does. So that for example, when the wild syncopations in one of the canons suddenly unfold into familiar jazz-inflected riffs, Adès finds and gets into this groove, and brings us into this familiar world for the brief moment that it lasts. Oppens, on the other hand seems more the detached observer letting it pass by.
In sum, this is a disc for anyone not afraid of the unfamiliar, who doesn't equate musical excellence with overt virtosic display.
The recorded sound is excellent, providing a warm, but very clear (essential for the Nancarrow!) acoustic.
