The attention of classical music in America on Thursday was divided between the opposite coasts. By coincidence, new piano concertos by two of the most important composers of our time had their premieres: Thomas Adès’ in Boston and John Adams’ in Los Angeles.
There is a deep and rich tradition in the meeting between a solo pianist and a symphony orchestra. The results can be thunderous battle, delicate sympathy, genial play — sometimes all in the same piece.
Adès, 48, and Adams, 72 — both with strongly individual voices, both keenly aware of what’s come before — are ideally suited to take on this looming history, and to contribute to it. David Allen, on the East Coast, and Zachary Woolfe, in the West, heard the results.
Adès: Radically Normal
BOSTON — Adès has written a piano concerto before, but not a Piano Concerto.
Aside from a brief “Concerto Conciso” (1997) for piano and chamber ensemble, his main foray in the genre to this point has been “In Seven Days” (2008), a depiction of the Creation in seven movements, with optional video installation.
His new and quite wonderful Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which Kirill Gerstein played Thursday with the composer leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is different. As Adès has put it, it’s a “proper piano concerto,” along the lines of Mozart or Bartok.
It has no title. It has whistle-worthy themes. It has three movements, fast-slow-fast, marked only by their tempos. It has an opening in sonata form, with a first subject, a second subject, a development section, a recapitulation and a cadenza. It has a poignant, melodic second movement. It has a slithering, cascading finale, with a coda that ends with a cadential sequence Beethoven might have been proud of.
It’s refreshingly, even radically, normal.
Surely it can’t be so? Even if his style is relatively approachable, Thomas Adès still is Thomas Adès, the once-iconoclastic composer of mischievous, sardonic works like “Powder Her Face” (1995), “Totentanz” (2013) and “The Exterminating Angel” (2016).
So you might expect me to point to some ironies I heard running as caustic undercurrents, tugging the whole thing down. Perhaps Adès is actually dismantling the concerto from within? Perhaps he’s offering a blistering, subversive take on what a frankly modern piano concerto can be, as he did more than 20 years ago for the symphony with “Asyla” (1997)?
If he is, I didn’t hear it.
Instead, Adès’ 20-minute work comes off as an affectionate, joyous, remarkably uncomplicated tribute to tradition. The writing is labyrinthine, to be sure, but this is a composer so sure of his abilities and influences that there is no sense in this concerto of history as a burden or as something to be thrown off. It is, rather, something to be approached as an equal.
And while plenty of composers talk about how they have thought about the tradition when they write a new concerto, few have placed themselves in it with such breathtaking ease as Adès does here.
As ever, the craft is astounding, the orchestration ceaselessly brilliant. The voice is wholly his own — dissonant, offbeat, whiplash, wry — even as it whispers to musics past.
Something of the angular, unnerving opening theme bears an uncanny resemblance to the upward, four-note motif that George Gershwin used for the words “I got rhythm.” Something about the slow movement, which pulls at the heart with an open directness that’s unusual in this composer’s music, can be traced to the atmosphere of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, its powerful brass and wind chorale answered with placid wonder by the piano, at least at first.
There’s a funny wink to hyper-Romantic excess when a glockenspiel tinkles above the fray at the end of the finale. The way a phrase will end, a mood shift, brings Rachmaninoff fluttering into mind. The technical demands are Lisztian and worse.
Not that anything seems to daunt Gerstein, the pianist who asked for the new work while rehearsing “In Seven Days” in Boston seven years ago. He dispatched this concerto with his customary virtuosity and commitment, but for all his double-octave flash, it was his tender voicing of the cluster chords that halo the melody of the slow movement that lingers in the ears. He played as if the concerto had been a friend for years.
These two artists have struck quite the partnership; they play piano duos at Zankel Hall on March 13 and bring the new concerto to Carnegie on March 20. Also on the bill then will be the same pieces performed in Boston: Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” given a raunchy if not quite fluent reading, and a loud, bombastic, thrillingly crude take on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. Be there. — DAVID ALLEN
Adams: Uneasily Fascinating
LOS ANGELES — After Yuja Wang had finished playing the premiere of Adams’ concerto at Walt Disney Concert Hall here, and the applause wouldn’t stop, she returned to the stage for an encore.
She played a piece by — who else? — John Adams. Dating back to 1977, “China Gates” is one of his earliest works, a short solo that’s a calm, steady precipitation of eighth notes: sometimes a smiling sunshower, sometimes a melancholy drizzle.
Coming right after the new concerto, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?,” it gave a moving summary of how far Adams has come over 40 years, in musical complexity and emotional nuance. And also how much his preoccupations of those long-ago days — tension between rhythmic regularity and tremors of instability; simultaneous propulsion and reflection — still interest him today.
Given its premiere by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which will tour it widely, “Must the Devil” is an uneasy experience: restless — indeed, relentless — but uncertain, pensive even when it’s peppy. Written during a period in which Adams also made a new opera, “Girls of the Golden West,” about the dark side of the California Gold Rush, the concerto comes across as a companion work.
Another gloomy, even bitter, study in Americana, its most distinctive bit of orchestration is a part for honky-tonk piano (ideally a detuned upright, but on Thursday conjured electronically, and far too weakly) that evokes the saloons — and, implicitly, the chauvinistic illusions — of Hollywood Westerns, while coming across as a devilish shadow of the “real” solo piano.
In three parts, played as a single movement of not quite half an hour, “Must the Devil” begins in a sudden surge and chugs along industriously but with stumbles — a machine that fails to find its groove. The music builds in intricacy but remains oddly reticent, with unsettling snaps and buzzes (“gritty, funky, but in strict tempo,” Adams indicates for this first section) from the double basses and an electric bass, located on opposite sides of the orchestra.
Relaxing into the second part with a lulling motif for bassoon and strings — you might think of Ravel — “Must the Devil” troubles the piano’s serenity with a sustained low tremble in the basses, and a disturbing plunk of honky-tonk. There’s early Adams (and the process minimalism that preceded him) in the melodic thread forming in repeated fits and starts, trying to emerge and complete itself. In passages, the soloist seems to be trying out a kind of rag, but while the rhythm has a gentle, low-slung swing, the piano never finds its footing.
The orchestra gently eggs the soloist on into the third section, inaugurated with frosty Adamsian fragments of trumpet fanfare. But there’s little sense of the triumph — or, at least, the reveling in extravagance and difficulty — of earlier finales by this composer. I found this conclusion much like the rest of the piece: anxious, fascinating, sad.
The ending comes all at once: The hubbub suddenly drops away, leaving a single toll of a bell. Has someone died? Something? A culture? A country?
Wang was an unfailing, cool to the touch, detailed soloist. Each note, even in a fast run, was precisely considered: a slippery smooth note followed by a diamond-hard one. The almost ominously immaculate quality of her playing was well suited to Adams’ dark fantasia, which offers virtuosity while staying — intentionally, I think — wary of its, and any, thrills. (There’s tellingly no cadenza to speak of.)
After intermission, Dudamel’s interpretation of Mahler’s First Symphony recalled aspects of “Must the Devil”: the off-kilter quality and troubled lyricism of the first movement, the ruefully swirling third. But, in its straightforward — even bland — healthy-mindedness, this Mahler more than anything acted as a kind of peace offering after Adams’ beautifully disconcerting concerto. — ZACHARY WOOLFE
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Event Information:
Boston Symphony Orchestra
This program continues through Saturday at Symphony Hall; bso.org.
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Through Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall; laphil.com.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.