Thomas Ades

*  America: A Prophecy
*  The Fayrfax Carol
*  Fool's Rhymes
*  January Writ
*  Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
*  The Lover in Winter
*  Life Story
*  Brahms
*  FOREMAN & SMITH: Cardiac Arrest (arr. Ades)
*  COUPERIN: Les Baricades misterieuses (trans. Ades)

Various soloists, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent (organ), Polyphony/Stephen
Layton, Claron McFadden (soprano), Christopher Maltman (baritone), City of
Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Composers Ensemble/Thomas Ades
EMI 7243 5 57610 2 6  Total time: 59:38

Summary for the Busy Executive: Boredom on a stupefying scale.

This will be quick.  I don't particularly enjoy writing about music I
dislike and consequently don't very often.  However, Ades has received
so much notice, I feel compelled to throw in my worthless opinion.

Thomas Ades (pronounced "Addis?") is currently the fair son of British
music.  Why, I can't tell you.  I got sucked into what I consider the
hype surrounding him and bought recordings of both Asyla and Powder Her
Face.  Fortunately, I can't remember much about either of them.  It's
really more of the same here.  I know Britain has better composers than
Ades currently about, because I've heard them.  Some of them are even
younger than forty.  Why is this guy getting work?

I should be clear.  There are many types of bad composers.  It's not
that Ades is unskilled.  He's not an autodidactic Self-Proclaimed Genius
who has no idea of the lowest note of the oboe or how he can find out.
His orchestration is often brilliant and imaginative.  However, I find
more real music in Brian Wilson's "Help Me, Rhonda" than in any work by
Ades.  America: A Prophecy, for example, steals its title, and nothing
else, from Blake.  It's a lament for the Mayans and their conquest and
genocide by Spain.  The music essentially varies a modal cell, representing
the Indians, and juxtaposes it with some 16th-century Spanish music.
There's a painterly battle between the two groups of ideas, and the
Spanish win.  Sounds interesting on paper, but not in performance.  The
vocal part doesn't illuminate the text in any way -- one of those lines
with the expressive power of a slide whistle's aimless tootles.  All of
the vocal music here suffers from that -- trendy texts set to supremely
uninteresting and unnecessary music.  The music adds nothing to the texts
themselves.  The two instrumental arrangements -- one of Madness's
"Cardiac Arrest" and another of Couperin's "Les Baricades misterieuses"
-- engaged me the most, mainly because of the orchestration.  When scoring
is the only thing you can talk about, the music is in real trouble.

The performances, however, are wonderful.  Soprano Claron McFadden
delivers a knockout in Life Story.  I've never heard a singer with her
command of line and of seamless travel between classical and jazz singing.
She convinces you totally.  Ades specifies the model of Billie Holiday.
McFadden pulls it off without the curse of artifice.  Baritone Christopher
Maltman sings like the great Lieder artist he is in Brahms, to a text
by Alfred Brendel.  The piece, I admit, is fun, mainly for all the Brahms
references (particularly the second of the Vier ernste Gesaenge).  However,
again Ades fails to find the song in the text.

It's a first-class production, and who, other than the composer, really
cares?

Steve Schwartz