Thomas Adés - Life Story - Warner Classics: 5696992 - download

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Adès has the gift of seizing your attention with strange but ravishingly beautiful sonorities and then holding it with entrancingly mysterious inventions that allure the ear. Yet he also has... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010 More…

Catalogue No: 5696992
Label: Warner Classics
Series: Debut
Length: 76 minutes

Adès: Catch Op. 4

Work length10:30

Album only

Anthony Marwood (violin), Louise Hopkins (cello), Lynsey Marsh (clarinet), Thomas Adès (piano)
Recorded: 1996-04-18
Recording Venue: 18th April 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road; Lyndhurst Hall, AIR Studios

Adès: Darknesse Visible

Work length7:14

$1.30

$1.70

Thomas Adès (piano)
Recorded: 1996-03-15
Recording Venue: 13th - 15th March 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road; Lyndhurst Hall, AIR Studios

Adès: Still Sorrowing Op. 7

Work length9:54

$1.30

$1.70

Thomas Adès (piano)
Recorded: 1996-03-15
Recording Venue: 13th - 15th March 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road; Lyndhurst Hall, AIR Studios

Adès: Under Hamelin Hill Op. 6

Work length12:16

$3.90

$5.10

Thomas Adès (organ), David Goode (organ), Stephen Farr (organ)
Recorded: 1996-05-23
Recording Venue: 23rd May 1996, Lyndhurst Hall, AIR Studios

Preambulum (2 hands)

Track length3:43

$1.30

$1.70

Fuga (2-6 hands)

Track length4:36

$1.30

$1.70

Arietta (2 hands)

Track length3:57

$1.30

$1.70

Adès: Five Eliot Landscapes Op. 1

Work length15:57

$6.50

$8.50

Thomas Adès (piano), Valdine Anderson (soprano)
Recorded: 1996-02-19
Recording Venue: 19th February 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road, London

I. New Hampshire

Track length4:39

$1.30

$1.70

II. Virginia

Track length2:49

$1.30

$1.70

III. Usk

Track length2:29

$1.30

$1.70

IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe

Track length2:52

$1.30

$1.70

V. Cape Ann

Track length3:08

$1.30

$1.70

Adès: Traced Overhead Op. 15

Work length11:37

$3.90

$5.10

Thomas Adès (piano)
Recorded: 1996-03-15
Recording Venue: 13th - 15th March 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road, London

Sursum

Track length0:45

$1.30

$1.70

Aetheria

Track length2:13

$1.30

$1.70

Chori

Track length8:39

$1.30

$1.70

Adès: Life Story Op. 8b

Work length9:00

$1.30

$1.70

Mary Carewe (soprano), Thomas Adès (piano)
Recorded: 1996-03-15
Recording Venue: 13th - 15th March 1996, EMI Studio No 1, Abbey Road, London

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Reviews

2010

Adès has the gift of seizing your attention with strange but ravishingly beautiful sonorities and then holding it with entrancingly mysterious inventions that allure the ear. Yet he also has the much rarer quality of inspiring utter confidence. His style can't be defined by simply describing any one of these pieces.
Each solves a new problem or investigates a new scenario with such adroitness and completeness that it seems a quite new and delightful adventure. In Still sorrowing the starting point is a piano whose central register is muted with a strip of plastic adhesive. The effect on those pitches is obvious: they are dulled to a sort of subdued drumming, but by observing the new light that this casts on the undamped upper and lower registers Adès effectively invents a new and alluring instrument, or rather three of them. And he plays them with poetry and wonder.
Catch is a game in which a piano trio tempt and tease an off-stage clarinet; he eventually joins them in sober homophony, for this is a game with serious and lyrical substance as well as a jest. A similar but more ambiguous game is played in Under Hamelin Hill, where the piping toccata of one organist attracts two others to join him in co-operative apparent improvisation, but he's left alone for a shadowy soliloquy filled with shudders.
Darknesse visible is a haunting meditation in which the presence of John Dowland is clearest where the music seems least like him; a magical illusion as well as a moving homage. In Life story the soprano is asked to imitate the manner of Billie Holiday in her wry reflection on a casual one-night encounter; it's the dark, searching piano that adds pity and bleakness to turn this into a riveting miniature opera. Traced overhead is filled with mysterious, glancing references to remembered piano music, but is grippingly coherent. And as if this weren't enough, in the Eliot settings, Op 1, the 17-year-old Adès already proved himself a song-writer of rare talent.
The performances are first-rate.

Thomas Adés - Life Story

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