On 27 July Omega Ensemble and David Rowden give the Australian premiere of Thomas Adès’ basset clarinet quintet Alchymia at Pier 2/3, The Neilson, in Sydney.
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. Alchymia was written for Mark Simpson and Quatour Diotima, who premiered it at Kings Place in London in 2021 and released its world premiere recording autumn 2023; Simpson gave the US premiere of the piece in August 2023 as part of a focus on Adès at La Jolla Music Society.
It has since been widely taken up. Its Finnish premiere was given by members of the Finnish Radio Symphony at Helsinki Music Centre in March 2024; it was also performed by the Doric Quartet and Jelmer de Moed at the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam in January this year. Summer 2024 also sees Alchymia performed at Yellow Barn Music School and Festival (19 July), Incontri in Terra di Siena in Perugia (by Lawrence Power, Paul Meyer, Lisa Batiashvili, Maximilian Hornung, and Sarah Christian, on 26 July) and at Marlboro Music Festival, Vermont in August.
On 15 September it receives its Danish premiere with musicians from the Royal Danish Opera Orchestra and tours the UK with performers from the International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove in October – an organisation with whom Adès has had a long creative partnership.
Only Adès could have written this strange, magical and arresting piece
The Times (Geoff Brown), 1 October 2021
A triumphant premiere from our greatest living composer… Each of its four movements took something simple and transmuted it into something rich and strange… All very Adès, and there were indeed things about this new piece that seemed familiar… But there were also things that suggested Adès has opened a door onto a new phase… The boldest movement was the last. Based on the “barrel-organ” melody of the final scene of Berg’s opera Lulu the piece took the melody by the hand and led it gently through different keys, dressing it in different musical clothes in a spirit of ironic playfulness.
The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 1 October 2021