15 - The Adès Effect

Summary

In 2001, Thomas Adès (b. 1971) might well have been the youngest British composer to be included in the second edition of The New Grove. His achievements at 30 brought the inevitable comparisons with such earlier twentieth-century prodigies as Benjamin Britten and Richard Rodney Bennett; and over the years since 2001 his compositions have been subject to closer and more specialised scrutiny than those of any other British composer born since 1950. Along with a short monograph in French and a book of conversations (see note 11) there have been several essays of the ‘close reading’ variety, together with a book-length study of the 20-minute orchestral work Asyla (1997), all referenced below. Such a degree of academic as well as critical attention has been nurtured by the high profile of Adès's later compositional commissions, especially for substantial orchestral works and operas, since the turn of the millennium; and, not so differently from Britten or Bennett, some critics have sensed the potential for the kind of superficiality that can go with being supremely gifted, as pianist and conductor as well as composer. It has been pointed out that Adès's commitment to such traditional genres as opera and concerto can lead to a dilution of the more radical attributes emphasised in those earlier, smallerscale works of the 1990s in which essential alignments between personality and technique were still being formed.

The operas Powder her Face (1995), The Tempest (2003) and The Exterminating Angel (2016), along with the major orchestral pieces Asyla (1997), Tevot (2007) and Polaris (2010–11), provide the core of the Adès enterprise, and have aroused varied responses. Those tending to the negative, like Robert Stein's review of Polaris, contrast what he judged to be a change from the ‘camp and expressionist’ Powder her Face to music ‘rooted in naturalism, academic technique and good taste’ – music setting up associations in Stein's ears with Benjamin Britten and the American minimalist Michael Torke. Not surprisingly, more detailed, more academic studies are usually more positive, starting with Christopher Fox's 2004 essay on four works from the years 1999–2003: America: A Prophecy, Piano Quintet, Brahms (a setting of a comically macabre poem by Alfred Brendel for baritone and orchestra) and The Tempest.