‘I feel like I have risked it all to make this album’
LPO/ADÈS
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 ★★★★★
The concerto, and in particular the piano concerto, is the bestloved of all musical forms. And yet its more gladiatorial and virtuosic aspects might suggest it is a relic of a bygone age. But composers remain as drawn to the genre as audiences are and, this autumn, London is hearing new piano concertos by two of today’s leading composers. Next month, Yuja Wang and the Los Angeles Philharmonic bring John Adams’s new piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? to the Barbican, and here at the Festival Hall, Kirill Gerstein was reunited with the composer Thomas Adès (who conducted) for the first British performance of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
Premiered by the same pair in Boston, Adès’s work has now been taken up by the London Philharmonic, and other leading orchestras are queuing up. People will want to hear it, and it is easy to see it becoming one of Adès’s most successful works. The textures in the big, broad opening would not be out of place in Rachmaninov, one reason why Gerstein (working hard here on his 40th birthday) is such a good fit for this music. Echoes of Gershwin and Ligeti are there too, but it is the composer’s own ideas that are most striking and he is never afraid to niggle away – in the best possible sense – at them. Scored for big orchestra, there are turbulent outbursts, but the focus is on the soloist, and Gerstein dispatched the cadenza in spectacular fashion.
In the slow movement, where the soloist’s opening theme is ghosted by gongs, the solemnity of tolling chords sets the tone and the finale is full of burlesque gaudiness. Though lasting a concise 22 minutes, the new work feels much more substantial than the composer’s previous, filmaccompanied piano concerto In Seven
Days. Its traditional form shows that Adès has left his enfant terrible days far behind.
You could hear why Adès was comfortable coupling his work with the first masterpiece of English modernism, Holst’s The Planets. He unleashed a blistering performance of this music, written during the First World War – perhaps it was Holst’s disgust at what was happening on Earth that led him to omit our planet from his suite. Yet the concert had opened very much back on Earth, with Sibelius’s Nightride and Sunrise: the playing could have been tauter at first but Adès – always alert to the pictorial impulse – drove things towards a luminous climax.