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.