Fans of British composers
Thomas Adès may well already have the majority of the pieces in this compilation because they have been released before. The two-CD set does include two premiere recordings, though, which should tempt anyone who loves his music to invest in this album. The composer plays the four-movement Concert Paraphrase from Powder her Face, the opera that propelled him into the international spotlight, and Three Mazurkas, both of which were given their first performance in 2010. They are not large pieces, but they are delightful in a way typical of much of
Adès' music: quirkily off-kilter but graceful, with shimmering, transparent textures, and a sense of rightness and inevitability in their development that mark
Adès as The Real Thing. The other pieces on the first CD, Arcadiana for string quartet and the Piano Quintet, plus the Chamber Symphony on the second disc, have much of the same character. America: A Prophecy (1999), commissioned by the
New York Philharmonic, shows a far darker side of the composer's vision. A cantata for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, it depicts the Spanish destruction of the Mayan culture, and its title and some of its text make it eerily prescient of the devastation of 9/11/2001. Its texts are taken from Mayan prophecy and a song by Spanish composer Mateo Flecha that was written around the time of the Mayan conquest. It's a powerful and disturbing work that's bound to chill anyone with a memory of 9/11. Soprano
Susan Bickley and the composer leading the
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus deliver a gripping performance. The Violin Concerto "Concentric Paths" is a striking, immediately appealing work that explores extremes in register, timbre, and emotional content and is characterized by a tone of mystery and transcendence. The performances featured on the set, by some of the finest ensembles around, including the
Arditti Quartet, the
London Sinfonietta, and the
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, are consistently first-rate, and EMI's sound is always clean and vivid.