Latest news with #ThomasAdès
Spectator
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed
Grade: A– There's a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the Establishment. Right now, you can watch it happening in real time to Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage – inevitably, unwittingly, falling unto the pattern established by Sir Arthur Bliss, who shocked critics in the 1920s but died in 1975 as a KCVO, CH and Master of the Queen's Music. I knew musicians who played under him at the end of his life. One described him as 'a cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria'. Bliss was a very capable conductor and this collection of live broadcasts of his own music gives us back the firebrand behind the national treasure. The tapes have been cleaned up by the enterprising indie label Somm, and include fierce accounts of his Colour Symphony and the volcanic Piano Concerto of 1939, with John Ogdon as soloist. In the 1960s, when these pieces were recorded, British orchestras didn't really do lushness, but this is music that demands urgency, and these wiry, sometimes jagged performances convey an authentic inter-war restlessness and bite. And then there's Morning Heroes, the haunted choral symphony in which Bliss threw everything he had – orchestral laments, explosive choruses and great chunks of the Iliad (declaimed here by the actor Donald Douglas) – into a doomed attempt to find meaning in the first world war. Imagine Britten's War Requiem without the slickness (Bliss was gassed at Cambrai and his brother Kennard died on the Somme). In this live Proms performance from 1968, it makes questions of musical fashion feel very small indeed.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Adès, Leith, Marsey: Orchestral Works album review – an impressive collection marks a productive association
Since 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey's Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith's Cartoon Sun. Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadences. Tower – for Frank Gehry is a fanfare, and both Shanty and Dawn, composed during lockdown in 2020, are pieces that work wonders with repeated phrases. Marsey's musical narrative, in eight 'scenes', is a strangely evocative succession of musical ghosts, inspired by paintings by Salman Toor, while Leith's wacky processional, punctuated by enormous climaxes, leaves an exhilarating impression. It's altogether an impressive disc, a fine record of a productive association, though it's a shame there was no room on it for the exceptional performance of his own Tevot that Adès conducted in Bridgewater Hall too. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Adès, Leith, Marsey: Orchestral Works album review – an impressive collection marks a productive association
Since 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey's Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith's Cartoon Sun. Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadences. Tower – for Frank Gehry is a fanfare, and both Shanty and Dawn, composed during lockdown in 2020, are pieces that work wonders with repeated phrases. Marsey's musical narrative, in eight 'scenes', is a strangely evocative succession of musical ghosts, inspired by paintings by Salman Toor, while Leith's wacky processional, punctuated by enormous climaxes, leaves an exhilarating impression. It's altogether an impressive disc, a fine record of a productive association, though it's a shame there was no room on it for the exceptional performance of his own Tevot that Adès conducted in Bridgewater Hall too. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
