Thomas Adès is no stranger to the stage. His operas Powder Her Face (1995) and The Tempest (2004) have clocked up a huge number of performances on both sides of the Atlantic, with The Tempest set to make its Viennese début in June 2015. Adès has yet to compose specifically commissioned music for dance, but that has not stopped his works being used by some of the most respected choreographers on the international stage, who are inspired by his startlingly rich, layered and at times challenging musical language.
His Violin Concerto Concentric Paths was used by Wayne Mc Gregor for Outlier, a New York City Ballet commission (Architecture of Dance, 2010). Karole Armitage chose the song cycle Life Story, set to words by Tennessee Williams, for her duet (of the same title). Both works now make their European debuts, alongside two world premieres – by Crystal Pite and Alexander Whitley – in Sadler’s Wells upcoming 'Thomas Adès: See the Music, Hear the Dance' (note the suggestive twist in the title). London’s creative powerhouse thought big here, and rightly so, for this commissioned evening is likely to be one of the most innovative, dialogic and challenging performances you will see for quite some time.
Adès himself will conduct the Britten Sinfonia in what will be his only London performances in 2014. We were keen to find out how the choreographers approached Adès’ music and hear how each has used its dynamics to enrich their very individual styles.
One of Adès’ foremost chamber works, his Piano Quintet, is the frame to Alexander Whitley’s The Grit in the Oyster.This single movement work starts with solo violin playing a three note figure, which recurs throughout. Referencing the classical tradition, it twists the style and sonata form into something more modern, a little like Stravinsky’s neoclassical take on Baroque works. Whitley describes the Piano Quintet as having “an interesting range of textures and dynamics, which I felt would provide a breadth of possibilities in the type of choreography I could set to it. There is also something about the combination of the classical sonata form structure and Adès’ modern ideas that appealed to my experience, having trained classically but moving into contemporary dance with my choreographic explorations.” The quintet makes use of fractured dance music – a waltz and a tango can be detected, anchoring, just as Whitley’s contemporary physical language is anchored in his classical roots, the modern experimentations of both composer and choreographer.
It’s perhaps precisely Adès’ dissident explorations, away from traditionally classic frames that inspired Karole Armitage to work with Life Story. The American choreographer has always been curious about how “the classical concepts and poetic expressivity of ballet can be combined with process-oriented dance, thus making [dance] modern by taking from concepts of our times”. She creates dances that have “theme and variation occurring simultaneously”, a symbiosis prevalent in Adès’ compositions. “Every piece is different, but I always look for music that has space in it so that a layer of dance adds a new dimension.I often like music that is either hyper-lyrical or full of noise and intensity. I am not one for the middle ground.” Life Story – like Balanchine’s Duo Concertant – places the musicians on-stage alongside the dancers (with Thomas Adès on the piano as well as soprano Claire Booth) and this union, she feels, is vital. “The most important aspect of having the music and the dance working together is the extreme sensitivity that goes on between musicians and dancers; the listening, looking and feeling makes it so ALIVE for the audience”; a seemingly contagious chemistry, as Armitage underlines: “The public feels the intensity and the immediacy in a way that cannot be replicated with recorded music.”
Singularity certainly influenced Wayne McGregor in choosing Adès’ music for Outlier, although, he tells us, it was not the initial driving force behind his work. “I was asked to make Outlier as part of ‘Architecture of Dance’ – a series about architecture. I wanted to look at the Bauhaus influence on American architecture and so I approached the creation from a visual image.