Thomas Adès: The Exterminating Angel Symphony, Violin Concerto. Leila Josefowicz (violin), Minnesota Orchestra, Thomas Søndergård (conductor). Pentatone PTC 5187487. Total Time: 39:37
DIGITAL REVIEW — Among his many other talents, Thomas Adès has been a savvy marketer of some of his wares that might be just too darned expensive for most performing arts organizations to mount. Take his operas. All three of them — Powder Her Face, The Tempest, and The Exterminating Angel — have corresponding suites of symphonic and chamber pieces that can be performed in concerts without the need for staging, lighting, costumes, singers, and all the other complicating factors that arise from such.
The last of the above-mentioned reboots is the headliner of a new recording by Thomas Søndergård and the Minnesota Orchestra. Not only is it the world premiere recording of The Exterminating Angel Symphony, it is the first recording Søndergård and the Minnesotans have made together, an adventurous departure from the conductor’s immediate predecessor Osmo Vänskä’s cycles of Beethoven, Sibelius, and Mahler symphonies.
While the liner notes claim that John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony is the first “notable example” of an “opera symphony,” the idiom, in fact, goes back deep into the 20th century — e.g. Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Die Harmonie der Welt Symphonies and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 3 based on music from The Fiery Angel.
In a compact 22 minutes plus, Adès’ “opera symphony” fashions three movements from actual stretches of music from the opera, while the fourth movement weaves a symphonic fabric made from bits and shards scattered throughout the score.
The “Entrances” movement leaps about abstractly yet with playfulness, eventually petering out down the scale into nothing. The “March” movement steps forth relentlessly at a brutal tread, the snare drum rat-a-tat-tatting throughout, almost like a march to the gallows. “Berceuse” provides a few minutes of introspective respite before an ominous coda leads without pause into “Waltzes,” a series of dances that slyly satirizes Ravel’s La valse and waltzes by the unrelated Strausses Johann II and Richard. Like the Ravel piece, it ends in near-chaos. The symphony is another example of Adès’ astonishing recent emergence as a master where he no longer feels the need to shock and can indulge his sense of humor and create emotional power.
The Violin Concerto, subtitled Concentric Paths, has already received a half-dozen or so recordings since its premiere in 2005, but I suppose new-music fans have been breathlessly waiting for the redoubtable Leila Josefowicz to put her stamp on it for the record.
The first movement, “Rings,” finds Adès exploiting the very top of the violin’s register much the way he tortures lyric sopranos in his operas. But nothing fazes Josefowicz; she plays it with deceptive ease, probably from memory, as she does with so many difficult contemporary works. She tightly grips the slow “Paths” movement, squeezing the angst from it, and rolls through the high-wire flights and modernist lyricism of the finale, “Rounds.”
The Minnesota Orchestra appears to be in good hands with Søndergård in charge, playing new music with the brilliance forged in the Vänskä era. Just one slight quibble: The total timing runs just under 40 minutes, or less than half the capacity of a full-priced CD, if this still means anything in the age of streaming.
