Thomas Adès and Kirill Gerstein take wing at the Lucerne Festival

Thomas Adès, considered one of today’s leading contemporary composers, pianists and conductors, draws on a huge spectrum of musical genres, transforming them into something that is not only novel, but also distinctly his own. Born in London in 1971, he regularly collaborates with leading international orchestras and festivals, and is this year’s Composer-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival, which is featuring a large number of his works. His joint recital with Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein was another of this superb festival’s must-see events.

The stage itself was promising: two Steinway concert grands nestled into one other like a single body; the audience seated in elevated rows in the building’s more informal Lucerne Hall. First on the programme was Claude Debussy’s En blanc et noir, composed in the midst of grave uncertainties around World War 1. The third movement, contrasts an airy, sweet genre, perhaps reflecting what the world had once been, and as a demonstrative appeal for what, in the context of war, Debussy wished for again as the “present”.

Next, in a rarely-heard arrangement that Dmitri Shostakovich made of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, there were echoes of a soldier’s march in the first movement, which the pianists, both imposing figures, met with strong bodily alignment. They tackled the dissonances of the second movement famously, reliably weaving the fabric of their two parts away from, then back to, one another, and mastering the piece’s unexpected intervals. The third movement, marked by what my neighbour called a “dissonance on steroids” was, again, a physically-demanding piece for both, but also impressed upon me just how hard Stravinsky’s score must have been for many to swallow when the piece was premiered!

By contrast, Debussy’s Lindaraja for two pianos, a tribute to the grand courtyard at the Alhambra in Granada, included Spanish coloration and was fairly predictable to the modern ear, the composer’s tempo instruction being “moderate, but not slow and in a very smooth rhythm”.

A work by Adès for two pianos followed: a concert version of the composer’s successful opera Powder Her Face, which features the scandalous life of the Duchess of Argyll, and is cited as “an indulgent homage to the virtuoso opera (with) paraphrases of Franz Liszt or Ferruccio Busoni, peppered with numerous pianistic cabinet pieces”. The work often took a given interval and distorted it, making a kind of glitter-glass of the notes, almost like posing tenuous arguments in a discussion. Fragments of melody morphed into cacophony, random configurations sometimes seeming like ragtime. A feast for the ear.

The recital ended with La Valse, Maurice Ravel's apocalyptic vision of doom in 3/4 time. Arranged for two pianos by the composer himself, its familiarity was an upbeat send-off. Interestingly enough, the grand piano’s name in German is “Flügel”, which translates into English as “wing.” In Adès and Gerstein’s imaginative and almost transportive two-piano programme, that instrument's name couldn’t have been more apt.