In March Thomas Adès will be the subject of a focus with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducting two concerts including Asyla, Tevot and Polaris, which will all be recorded on LSO Live.
Another work featured is Brahms for baritone and orchestra (2001), a 6-minute setting of an Alfred Brendel poem in which the ghost of Brahms stalks a house and plays the piano late at night. Adès describes this playful, but serious, piece as an ‘anti-homage’ and in it he seeks to take Brahms’s melodic and harmonic tics – such as sequences based on descending thirds, and densely contrapuntal textures – to ‘logical’ extremes. The tone of the work is never narrowly sarcastic, however. Instead, the limitations of the logic of Brahms’s material are used to great expressive effect, creating a compelling dramatic miniature in its own right, at once irreverent and profound.
More details about the concerts can be found here
Tevot is score of the week on the Faber Music Online Score Library