"Adès has opened a door onto a new phase." The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett)
Alchymia will receive its US premiere as part of a focus on Thomas Adès at La Jolla Music Society, San Diego, from 2-6 August. The clarinet quintet will be performed by Mark Simpson, who premiered the piece in 2021 at London’s Kings Place with Quatuor Diotima. Simpson is joined in the 20-minute piece by Alexei Kenney, Anthony Marwood, Rebecca Albers, and Coleman Itzkoff on 5 August at the Baker-Baum Concert Hall.
The Adès takeover at La Jolla sees the composer - who was presented with the 15th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award on 20 June - participate in several performances. He joins violinist Anthony Marwood for Märchentänze (2 August) and Four Berceuses from ‘The Exterminating Angel’ with Mark Simpson and Itsuki Yamamoto on 6 August. The Calder Quartet, who have extensively recorded Adès’ chamber music, perform Arcadiana and The Four Quarters in the latter concert. Adès will also perform music by Robert Schumann, Schubert, and Nancarrow at the piano.
Alchymia 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 Dowland’s song for lute reworked into fantasias for viol consort. 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. At the time of its composition, Alchymia was Adès’ most substantial chamber work since 2010’s The Four Quarters.
Simpson and Quatuor Diotima gave the German premiere of Alchymia at the Elbphilharmonie on 16 June at NDR das neue werk; on 8 July he performs the piece with the Doric quartet at the Cheltenham Music Festival. The piece was commissioned for Quatuor Diotima by Kings Place, with co-commissioners Quatuor Diotima, Bozar, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Milano Musica, NDR das neue werk, and Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ.
His latest piece of comparable scale is Növények (2020-22)¸ a 17-minute setting of seven Hungarian songs for mezzo-soprano and piano sextet that premiered last year at Wigmore Hall by Katalin Károlyi, the Ruisi Quartet, Joseph Havlat (piano), and Graham Mitchell (double bass). The US premiere will take place on 19 November at Jordan Hall, where Károlyi will be joined by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players with Adès at the piano.
A triumphant premiere from our greatest living composer… Adès has opened a door onto a new phase.
The Telegraph (Ivan Hewett), 1 October 2021
Outstanding…four spellbinding movements…Adès’s own alchemy was at its peak in the finale, which veered away from Elizabethan sources towards Berg…Only Adès could have written this strange, magical and arresting piece…
The Times (Geoff Brown), 1 October 2021