Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020)
Violin Concerto‘Concentric Paths’ (2005)
Leila Josefowicz (violin)
Minnesota Orchestra/ Thomas Søndergård
rec. live, 26-28 September 2024, Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Reviewed from a FLAC download 96kHz/24-bit
Pentatone PTC5187487 [40]
It’s not, I think, unduly hyperbolic of Nicholas Landrum writing in the booklet notes for this new disc of music by Thomas Adès, to describe the Violin Concerto, ‘Concentric Paths’, as ‘wildly popular’ for a contemporary piece. As evidence in support, how about the fact that the soloist here, Leila Josefowicz has performed it over sixty times? Or that one of October’s ‘Recordings of the Month’ here on Music Web International was a new disc which also featured the work? On that recording, Christian Tetzlaff pairs the Adès with the Elgar Violin Concerto. In a typically interesting and astute review my colleague Jonathan Woolf suggested that those who might have doubts over the Adès should buy the record anyway for Tetzlaff’s ‘superb’ Elgar and ‘allow the Adès to insinuate its way into your bloodstream, as it assuredly will.’ If you don’t know the work, that’s great advice. If you do, you’ll want to hear what Tetzlaff makes of it for sure and then compare it with this excellent performance by Josefowicz. Forgive the customary blitheness of the record reviewer towards finances when I say that you will want to have both. They’re fascinatingly different.
I’d characterise Tetzlaff’s performance as a little more extrovert, occasionally almost injunctive in his dialogue with the orchestra. He’s also seemingly fascinated by the modernist aspects of Adès’s writing too, especially in the work’s first movement where his relish of the technical challenges of the writing is infectious. Josefowicz, with all those performances behind her, seems to have found a slightly different way. There’s a haunting sense of great interiority in the way she approaches those first movement harmonics and arpeggiated figurations and she somehow seems to find liminal space in the moto perpetuo into which to inject a note of tenderness. Her reading of the second movement, ‘Paths’, is altogether more fleet, getting on for two minutes quicker than Tetzlaff (who is closer to the timings of Marwood and Hadelich on previous recordings), and the passion and intensity she achieves in that more compacted space is remarkable. That intensity is carried forward into the final movement, ‘Rounds’ which has a Stravinskian spikiness as well as a welcome, overt feeling of buoyancy and transparency. I’d say that the new partnership of Thomas Søndergård and the Minnesota Orchestra, excellent throughout, also achieve the gradual swallowing up of the soloist and the delightfully perfunctory conclusion of the work in a less effortful way that the BBC Philharmonic and Storgårds with Tetzlaff. A very fine reading by Josefowicz then, and it’s been thrilling to have listened to it alongside Tetzlaff. Josefowicz’s recording was made live as opposed to the studio conditions for Tetzlaff. I’m not sure to what extent that is a factor in the differences of interpretation and especially the second movement speed, but interestingly the Minnesota sound seemed to me to have more depth and resonance to it and slightly greater clarity and delineation. That may be an unfair comparison however, as I listened to Josefowicz from a high resolution download and Tetzlaff on a ‘lossless’ stream on Apple Classical (obviously not being blithe where my own finances are concerned).
The coupling for the Adès on the Minnesota disc is the first recording of his Exterminating Angel Symphony. The opera is a bold and brilliant conception in my view but hasn’t really seen the light of day since its performances at Covent Garden and the Met some years ago (the Met performance is available on their On Demand service and on DVD). As with his earlier opera, Powder Her Face, Adès has sought to ensure that some of the music gets a wider and more frequent hearing by creating a purely orchestral composition. I very much enjoyed this performance by Søndergård and his Minnesota players. Quite why the work has been called a ‘Symphony’ rather than a ‘Suite’ (as in the various Powder Her Face suites) I am not completely sure, but no matter. It is essentially a collection of extremely cleverly written scenes characterised by genre. The first movement, ‘Entrances’, is a high class and witty pastiche of ‘high society’ music put through the wringer. The second, ‘Marches’, is described in the booklet notes as ‘a haunting ode to Ravel’s Boléro’. I feel it’s much closer to a 21st Century take on the March from the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, with the relentlessness of the approaching doom of the guests in the opera being portrayed in a way which very much reminds one of the advancing army in the Shostakovich. The luxuriously orchestrated ‘Berceuse’ with its slightly sinister undertones has an almost Coplandesque feel to it at the start, but it develops excitingly into something more complicated. The final movement ‘Waltzes’ is an amalgam of waltz music taken from different stages of the opera. It’s highly effective writing down to its inevitable, slightly mystical, slightly Hollywood disintegration. The playing is very fine.
Anybody interested in Adès’s music should hear this. It’s also a very accessible introduction to those coming to it for the first time, although as we’ve seen, the Tetzlaff disc might be an even more alluring way in. It has a short playing time overall for something that is being sold as full price CD, just under 40 minutes, but there’s more than one way to assess value I suppose.
Dominic Hartley
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