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ADÈS AT 50: PRECARIOUS POISE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2021

Abstract

A range of aesthetic and technical features is explored in two of Adès's large-scale works, the operas The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, along with aspects of genre involving Stravinsky and Britten. Large-scale focus is offset by brief accounts of The Four Quarters and Dawn, considering their character in light of some recent initiatives in musicology.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Stravinsky, Igor, Themes and Conclusions (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 2627Google Scholar.

2 Edward Venn, ‘Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel’ (TEMPO, 71, no. 280, April 2017), p. 46, quoting Christian Arseni, ‘“Why do we ever do anything?”: Thomas Adès and Tom Cairns Talk about The Exterminating Angel’, 2016 Salzburg Festival programme book, p. 53.

3 György Ligeti in Conversation (London: Eulenberg Books, 1983), p. 115. For a well-illustrated analysis of Le Grand Macabre's ending, see Michael D. Searby, Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis. Transformation in His Musical Style, 1974–1985 (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010), especially chapters 2 and 3.

4 Arnold Whittall, ‘Affirmative Anger: James Clarke and the Music of Abstract Expressionism’, in British Music after Britten (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2020), pp. 119–32.

5 Thomas Adès and Tom Service, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 163.

6 See the perceptive discussion in Michael Ewans, ‘Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes: The Tempest’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 9, no. 3 (2015), pp. 232–50, esp. 244–45.

7 See Arnold Whittall, ‘A Voyage beyond Romance: the Music of Nicholas Maw’, in British Music after Britten, pp. 43–46.

8 Gerald Barry, liner notes with CD of The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (LARGO, 5135, 1997), p. 4.

9 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues (London: Faber Music/Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 34.

10 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, p. 123.

11 Ibid., p. 121.

12 Ibid., p. 118.

13 Ibid., p. 124.

14 Ibid., p. 125.

15 Ibid., p. 163.

16 Ibid., p. 177.

17 Thomas May, liner notes with DVD of The Exterminating Angel (Erato 0190295525507, 2019), p. 5.

18 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, p. 60.

19 Ibid., p. 147.

20 Paul Griffiths, liner notes with CD of The Four Quarters (Signum Classics SIGD413, 2015), p. 7.

21 Taruskin, Richard, ‘A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism’, in The Danger of Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009), pp, 147Google Scholar, 149.

22 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Dillon, Adès, and the Pleasures of Allusion’, in Aspects of British Music of the 1990s, ed. O'Hagan, Peter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 6Google Scholar.

23 Grimley, Daniel, Delius and the Sound of Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, p. 146.

25 Ibid., p. 147.

26 Ibid., p. 141.

27 Ibid., p. 174–75.

28 Ibid., p. 141.

29 Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer, Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful. A New Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 60.

30 Johnson, Julian, After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, p. 3.

32 Johnson After Debussy, p. 314, n. 70, quoting from Raffman's, Diana Language, Music and Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Ibid., p. 50.

34 Drew Massey, Thomas Adès in Five Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 142.

35 Ibid., p. 87.

36 Venn, ‘Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel’, p. 46.