There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer.
You knew there was something wrong after ten seconds. The piano played a rapid sequence of notes against a busy orchestral accompaniment. It felt like we’d been dropped right into the middle of things. Gyorgy Ligeti’s Piano Concerto of 1988 does much the same thing; in fact, it’s hard to think of two pieces of music whose opening bars sound so similar. The crucial difference is that Ligeti’s piano is enhanced by pizzicato strings and tom-toms; the delicate scoring reveals that it’s all part of a metrical game. In contrast, Adès’s soloist and full orchestra tried to drown each other out. The result was confusion: you didn’t know what you should be listening to.
Where Ligeti keeps playing his game, Adès quickly swerves into late-romantic splashiness. Andrew Clements in the Guardian called it ‘wrong-note Rachmaninov’, but that analogy would work better if the orchestra had stopped yelling for a second. Gerstein looked as if he wanted to call the landlord. Clements also heard traces of Prokofiev, Britten and of course Ligeti. I’d add Bartok to that list, and specifically the gentle piano chorale in the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in