On 11 February in Houston Thomas Adès, the Calder Quartet and clarinettist Andrew Lowy perform Adès’ Alchymia, Piano Quintet, and Arcadiana at the Menil Collection; Adès also plays piano works by Janáček and Schubert.
The concert is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Tacita Dean: Blind Folly, with Adès in conversation with the artist on 10 February. Dean created the spectacular designs for Adès’ celebrated debut ballet score Dante – evoked by several works in the forthcoming exhibition – as well as a limited-edition photogravure print for the vinyl release of the work in 2023, presented in a beautiful custom-made box – details here.
Alchymia, a 20-minute basset clarinet quintet, is cast in four movements, each entailing 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 references a Dowland lute song reworked into fantasias for viol consort, recast in turn. The final movement turns to another lute song, albeit from the twentieth century: variations on music from the final scene of Berg’s Lulu.
The Piano Quintet (2000) is a large-scale reimagining of sonata form across a single 20-minute movement. Tonal building blocks are the starting point for rich and intricate processes of transformation, with an especially unstable and volatile energy coming from subtle metrical juxtapositions. Its recapitulation, a huge accelerando that winds the music up to four times its original speed, unleashes an unstoppable momentum. “The effect is of a dramatic and temporal compression”, Tom Service wrote of the piece, “as if it were squeezed into this musical black hole.”
Adès’ 1994 string quartet Arcadiana evokes vanished or vanishing idylls across its 21-minute span. Its odd-numbered movements have an aquatic bent – the “ballad of a lugubrious gondolier”, a riff on Schubert’s Auf dem Wasser zu singer¸ a ship seen swirling away to L’Isle Joyeuse, and the oblivion of Lethe. Among the arcadias evoked by the other movements is, fittingly for a programme presented by the Menil Collection, a reference to Nicolas Poussin in ‘Et… (tango mortale)’ – the dead centre of its seven movements.
The Calder Quartet have given over fifty performances of Adès’ music since 2008. In 2015 they released The Twenty-Fifth Hour, featuring the Piano Quintet (for which they were joined by Adès), Arcadiana, and the world premiere recording of The Four Quarters, a work they have presented at venues including Wigmore Hall, the Perth International Festival, and La Jolla Music Society.