In June 2026 the Doric Quartet and Lloyd Van’t Hoff toured Thomas Adès’ basset clarinet quintet Alchymia as part of the Musica Viva series to venues in Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle, and Adelaide.
…an introspective, emotionally bruising clarinet quintet…[an] intense and intimate work…how masterfully Adès interweaves the clarinet’s voice with the violins, viola and cello…
InDaily Queensland (Gillian Wills) 18 June 2026
The 20-minute work is cast in four movements, each of which, as the title suggest, entails a magical musical transformation. The first – ‘A Sea-Change (…those are pearls…) – recalls lines from The Tempest imagining the drowned king’s eyes. The Woods So Wild draws on a Tudor song turned into variations for keyboard by William Byrd. Lachrymae refers to a Dowland lute song reworked into fantasias for viol consort, recast in turn by Adès for the quintet. The final movement turns to another lute song, albeit from the twentieth century, in a set of variations on music from the final scene of Berg’s Lulu. Adès employs the basset clarinet for its extended range, a feature that has long enamoured him of the instrument; his 1990 Chamber Symphony began life as a concerto for it.
The piece made its Australian debut in July 2023 from Omega Ensemble and David Rowden at Pier 2/3, The Neilson, in Sydney, and has subsequently appeared with the Australian String Quartet and Michael Collins at UKARIA and with Julian Bliss at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music.
It was written for Mark Simpson and Quatuor Diotima, who premiered it at Kings Place in London in 2021 and released the world premiere recording in 2023; Simpson gave the US premiere of the piece in 2023 as part of a focus on Adès at La Jolla Music Society. It has since been taken up widely, appearing with members of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, International Musicians’ Seminar Prussia Cove, Yellow Barn Music School and Festival, and Marlboro Music Festival.