Thomas Adès is an extraordinary polymath. Best known as a prodigious and multifaceted composer, he also has an international conducting career and – by the way – is a brilliant pianist. Last night at the Wigmore Hall was the first time I have heard him live at the keyboard and – having been in the past sometimes unconvinced by his conducting – would actually now place his piano playing as the second of the three strings to his bow. I would love to hear him play more.
It was a beautifully constructed programme, with perhaps the exception of the first piece. Haydn’s Variations in F minor Hob. XVII:6 are melancholy, mercurial and full of detailed piano writing: a strangely weighty start to the programme. Adès’s playing pointed up inner lines and unlikely syncopations in a way that was whimsical, but didn’t always feel suited to Haydn’s serious intent. I don’t think it is Adès’s piece. Which is certainly not true of Stravinsky’s Serenade, a rarely performed neoclassical gem from 1925 (I have never heard it live since discovering it as a teenager). Here Adès’s lightning shifts of character and tone were perfect. From the grandiose “Hymne”, to the “Romanza” that settles into a melody pre-echoing The Rake’s Progress, through the driven “Rondoletto” to the meltingly beautiful “Cadenza Finale”, Adès was in complete control and a winning advocate for this little-known jewel.
He followed with Janáček’s “In Tears” from On an Overgrown Path, written as the composer’s daughter lay dying. It is moving beyond description, touching and tragic in equal measure, and Adès played with restraint and the gentlest touch. More involved were the Blanca Variations, an off-shoot of his opera The Exterminating Angel, in which a simple folk tune gradually accrues more and more notes, Adès picking his way through the complex textures that develop.
I have rarely laughed out loud at a programme note before, but Marina Frolova-Walker clearly detests Bartók’s Piano Sonata so much that she can’t find anything positive to say – I kept waiting for the “but” that never came. It is “filled with harsh noises… rebarbative dissonances”, featuring “hooliganism” and “grossly distorted structures” which “command the listener’s attention, if not necessarily affection”. Say what you really think, Marina! Adès, by contrast, clearly loves it, and tucked into the outer movements with an appetite. The low register rang resonantly and Bartók’s busy, asymmetrical patterns emerged with a wit that made sense of the pounding rhythms. The spacious and stretched middle movement didn’t perhaps have enough space or stretch, but pace Frolova-Walker, I loved this clangorous, pyrotechnic masterpiece of 1920s modernism.
In another complete switch of tone, we then had Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 in E, Op. 109, whose short first two movements, dispatched with no nonsense, dissolve into a massive set of variations on a chorale-like theme. This is visionary music, improvisatory and yet carefully planned to arrive in a halo of trills which are a huge technical challenge to the pianist. Adès’s technique stood up, though, and he still had the energy afterwards to play his own “Vesper”, a tribute to Purcell transcribed from a guitar original, and two encores. These were nods back to Adès’s debut album as a pianist: Couperin’s “Les Baricades Mistérieuses” and Kurtág’s “Hommage à Beethoven”. The former was quite odd in its dynamics and had a bizarre slamming on of the brakes at the end – Adès clearly trying something different with a piece he knows inside out, but nearly pushing it too far – and the latter a dreamy evocation of the world of the E major sonata.
