Adès and Gerstein on exhilarating form
Michael Church is left spellbound by the results of a great musical partnership
Thomas Adès
Powder Her Face: Concert Paraphrase*; Berceuse; Mazurkas; In Seven Days†
Kirill Gerstein, *Thomas Adès (piano); †Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra/thomas Adès Myrios MYR027 58:02 mins Kirill Gerstein became involved with Thomas Adès’s music when bowled over by the composer’s early recordings of his own works. Since 2012 it has been both a keyboard partnership and a creative one: Berceuse, the Mazurkas and the Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face were all written for the Russianamerican pianist.
For Gerstein this music, like Beethoven and Bach’s, has become part of his DNA, the difference being that with this living composer he can discuss details of performance. Gerstein talks about Adès’s use of tonality, his ‘irrational meters’ and the infinite precision required to render the flow of these pieces; Adès’s notation, says Gerstein, creates a precisely shaped written-out rubato.
Composer and pianist may talk in terms of ideas and technicalities, yet this recording makes an exhilarating hour of beauty and strangeness. The two-piano Powder Her Face paraphrase expands on the original solo one and allows the two instruments to play resonantly off each other – for example, one playing short, percussive notes while the other surrounds it in an enveloping fog. Contrasting with the cheeky pastiches of Powder Her Face, Berceuse is poised and exquisitely tender, and the Mazurkas – Chopinesque in gesture and rhythm – feel like a translation into a parallel musical language which is somehow entirely recognisable.
Gerstein describes In Seven Days as being about the birth of the universe – but for me it’s simply a triumphant cavalcade of delicately glittering and gloriously sensuous effects.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
A triumphant cavalcade of delicately glittering effects
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