When is the last time you heard a spontaneous eruption of applause during a piece of contemporary music? The Thieves – devoured by reptiles, the penultimate movement from Thomas Adès' Inferno Suite drew such a response last night at the Royal Festival Hall. It’s a Shostakovich-like orchestration of a circus galop (Liszt's Grand Galop Chromatique) that careered its madcap course pursued by percussion – a particularly enthusiastic whip – and lewd trombones for three exhilarating minutes, with the composer himself firing up the London Philharmonic Orchestra, bouncing off his feet.
The LPO’s programming is often attractive, but this concert was brilliantly constructed, an Adès piece in each half, drawn from one of his stage works, each paired with music based on the same literary source. The Inferno Suite, extracted from the first act of Dante, his ballet triptych, shared the platform with Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, while the first half of the evening was focused on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, seeing the UK premiere of a symphony based on Adès’ 2003 opera following incidental music by Sibelius.
If you had never heard Sibelius’ Tempest overture before, you might have thought they had switched the running order because the cacophonous sounds of wind and waves are not far from the storm whipped up at the start of Adès’ opera. This is “late” Sibelius, composed in 1925-6, to be followed by Tapiola and then years of silence. Numbers like The Oak Tree grew out of dissonant chords, while Caliban’s Song danced grotesquely. Adès drew characterful playing from the LPO, especially fine in the sparsely-scored Berceuse and Ariel’s Song.
In Adès’ opera, the role of Ariel was composed for a stratospherically high soprano. In his Tempest Symphony, the vocal lines are taken by the instruments, high woodwinds in Ariel’s case. It feels more like a suite than a symphony, written in five titled movements. Sections like The Feast demonstrate Adès’ vivid orchestrational mastery, harp, piano and glockenspiel tickling the ear as Ariel conjures up a feast for the shipwreck survivors.
In the eight-movement Inferno Suite, it was fun to play Spot the Composer – Liszt on steroids as we abandoned all hope on entering the gates of hell, but, along with the aforementioned Shostakovich, there were hints of Rachmaninov (The Isle of the Dead) too as The Ferryman’s boat transporting Dante and Virgil lurched across the river. After Wayne McGregor’s ballet premiered last season, it was good to be reacquainted with this entertaining score via these cherry-picked highlights.
Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini was given an impulsive, no holds barred reading that saw Adès driving the LPO at full throttle. There were moments of tremendous beauty, such as Benjamin Mellefont’s liquid clarinet line, but this was stormy, passionate stuff, swirling in a maelstrom of brass with plenty of welly (technical term) in the tam-tam crashes to bring down the curtain on a thrilling concert.
