United States Ravel and Adès: Kirill Gerstein (piano), Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra / Thomas Adès (conductor). Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 10.2.2024. (LV)
Adès – Five Spells from The Tempest; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Ravel – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand; La valse
Thomas Adès took the podium with the same Los Angeles Philharmonic (conducted by Gustavo Dudamel) that had just won the Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance with his Dante ballet score. This concert played on the relationship between the young composer and the legend with a curiously short program in which the LA performances of his brilliantly designed and detailed music were interleaved with two minimalistic gems by Ravel.
It is obvious at the opening bars of Adès’s Five Spells suite, drawn from his career-changing opera, The Tempest, that it is meant to be an accompaniment. Composed 18 years earlier, it condenses two hours of music into 22 minutes. The Overture has the feel of the huge J. Arthur Rank Presents gong – perfect for the tempest, of course. Ariel and Prospero make cartoonish dancing figures, while the love of Ferdinand and Miranda emerges in a cloud of sighs above woodwind filigrees. The composer’s spectrum of orchestral sounds expands in ‘The Feast’ to include icicles high in the woodwinds, harmonics in the strings and a trio of barking trombonists bringing Ariel’s vicious dogs alive. Prospero’s farewell to Miranda at the end unfolds like petals to the impending light.
Since its premiere in 2019 by its dedicatees, Kirill Gerstein and the Boston Symphony, Adès’s 22-minute Piano Concerto has received 50 performances and a recording by DG. The Allegramente opens resplendently like a coronation march under which urban commotion seems to flash; six percussionists mobilize but, despite a riveting cadenza, there is not much happening in the way of melody besides an incessant rising figure. The first movement’s adventures include glissandi by Gerstein matched miraculously by the LA Phil, before drifting through modes and moods to the end. The slow middle movement decays into an Allegro giocoso finale that breaks out with the noisy enthusiasm of primary school students who have been excused early for recess. An attractive mini cadenza and a heavy-footed waltz precede an ending passage through a Great Gate of Kiev arch.
The many wonderful things in Gerstein’s performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand were like a summer performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Everything was beautifully played, at times like a Technicolor film score from the 1950s, with a light sprinkling of fragile French piano sound, and Gerstein accumulated tremendous momentum through the cadenza leading to the end. Ravel’s La valse, which concluded the concert, was beguiling, relatively speaking, Adès dancing gracefully on the podium, the orchestra … not so much.
Laurence Vittes
Thomas Adès a young composer? He’s 52. As Tom Lehrer almost put it, when Mozart was that age, he had been dead for 17 years.
S&H: this is amusing enough to leave on here, but I wonder what you consider old? To me at my age 52 is still young(ish)! Jim