Thomas Adès: In Seven Days (world premiere)
28.04.08, Ether 08, Royal Festival Hall, London, UK: Nicolas Hodges (piano)/London Sinfonietta/Thomas Adès/Tal Rosner (video artist)
‘…the Adès work, involving six large screens on which a dazzling fantasy of colour and semi-abstraction sustained itself for half an hour, could hardly have been more alluring.
The music was just as dazzling as the visuals, and was its own kind of novel imagery. The title refers to the seven days of creation, and the screen at the start shows the bare ocean, but Adès’s equivalent is a strangely poised and delicate string music with a vaguely Elizabethan-consort flavour. In the fifth of the seven (continuous) movements, there is a parallel display of the upper woodwind, a nine-part burbling that suggested Messiaen birdsong or an excursion from the piano concerto by Michael Tippett. Adès’s solo writing looks even more demanding than Tippett’s, and glories in extremes of register, but one notices that, for all the intricacy of the score’s notation, the actual sounds are transparent and instantly telling. One left the hall lost in a kaleidoscope of colour, touched by an exquisitely decorative experience.’
The Sunday Times (Paul Driver), 4 May 2008
‘Thomas Adès may be the most treasured idol of the classical new music scene, but perhaps for that very reason he has an urge to leap beyond it. With his latest piece In Seven Days, he certainly succeeded.
Part of the attraction was that Adès's new piece has the visual element youth culture demands.
No wonder the hall was humming with anticipation. And the new piece delivered everything that was expected of it, in the sense that it was a technical tour de force that took your breath away.
The images, divided across six screens, morphed and flowed with unstoppable invention.
Meanwhile, the music clamoured for our attention. The pianist, Nicholas Hodges, had to summon up every kind of texture - minimalist, star-like patterning, vast tempestuous chorales, gentle almost Ravel-like musings - while coping with rhythms of staggering complexity derived from the number seven. Adès conducted with his customary urgent, coaxing intensity.’
The Daily Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 30 April 2008
‘In Seven Days, Thomas Adès’s new “piano concerto with moving image”, given its immaculate premiere by Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta with the composer conducting, comes neatly packaged not only with visuals – Tal Rosner’s virtuosically manipulated screen images – but with a programme.
What grabs the attention are the rich textures Adès extracts from no more than a chamber orchestra in what for him is an unusually decorative piece, with proliferating string lines and woodwind tracery…
At times it all meshes tellingly with Rosner’s images: stammering brass chords counterpointed with golden geometric shapes on the six screens; tangled flutes depicting the beginnings of life with points of light accumulating above them.’
The Guardian (Andrew Clements), 2 May 2008
‘Adès’s score is a limber collage of English Pastoral, neo-classicism and romanticism. Frank Bridge-style string-figures yield to wry, Stravinskian wind. Sensory overload is a given as sun, moon and stars appear in glistening percussion. A Brahmsian lullaby for horn leads into a Schumannesque swell of divisi double-basses and a series of open-ended Mahlerian cadences. …how exciting to hear a Romantic voice in this unromantic age.’
The Independent on Sunday (Anna Picard), 4 May 2008
‘Adès, now 37 but still regarded as one of Britain’s hottest young musical talents, this collaboration with his civil partner Tal Rosner, who created the Bafta-nominated opening titles for Skins, was a first late dip into the world of multimedia.
Even explosive moments of chaos remain airborne rather than dark and dense. Unexpectedly, the sound world draws on an English tradition, … which is at times divided into 10 richly sonorous parts.
Scored for a medium-sized orchestra with a variety of bells and marimbas — it is accompanied by Rosner’s oscillating abstract images, displayed on six large screens.
Soloist Nicholas Hodges delivered the aurally uncomplicated piano textures impressively…’
Evening Standard (Fiona Maddocks), 29 April 2008
