Thomas Adès - Piano - Want It All

Thomas Adès - Piano

To some, he's the dazzling prince-elect of the new-music scene; to others, he's the spoiled brat decked out in an entire wardrobe of the emperor's new clothes--and each side seems to preach to the converted. Well, whatever your take on the music of young British composer Thomas AdÃ¨s, who has already written full-scale works in a stunning array of genres--from the sensitive cycle Five Eliot Landscapes to the opÃ©ra du scandale Powder Her Face and the symphony Asyla--give yourself an unprejudiced listen to AdÃ¨s as performer on the recital album Piano and you'll discover yet another dimension to the musical world inhabited by the young upstart--one that holds manifold surprising delights. The most obvious is, of course, the choice of program--and kudos to EMI for backing the bold choices AdÃ¨s has made--which flies against the current trend toward cozy familiarity or, at best, a mixture of chestnuts with scary unknowns. Not that this is "scary" modern music; instead, it's a gracious, beguiling manifesto for the art of the piano miniature, in modernist, postmodernist, neoclassical, even late-romantic guises. Even the familiar composers are represented by obscure works: some peasant dances of Grieg, some motley pages of little-known Stravinsky, a sonatina of Busoni.
A lot of the fun here is in allowing yourself to discover some of the gems you'll very likely never have heard before: the personality-drenched, enigmatic, Paul Klee-like "games" of KurtÃ¡g (one of AdÃ¨s's early mentors) and--most of all--Alexey Stanchinsky's completely enthralling Piano Sonata No. 2, which also happens to be the longest work here, though the varying senses of time each piece unravels become positively Einsteinian as the program progresses. AdÃ¨s is like a kid in a candy shop, sharing his enthusiasm with each discovery--it's the perfect merger of personalities between performer and composer. He doesn't play pyrotechnical showoff, even in the head-spinning dual-tempo feats of the Nancarrow canons concluding the disc. Rather, he seems more interested in inviting his audience to participate in each given world. Technique with insouciant energy and boundless humor--the entire recital is a blast. --Thomas May
Country USA
Brand EMI
Manufacturer Emi Classics Imports
Binding Audio CD
ReleaseDate 2000-11-21
UnitCount 1
UPCs 724355705129
EANs 0724355705129

Country	USA
Brand	EMI
Manufacturer	Emi Classics Imports
Binding	Audio CD
ReleaseDate	2000-11-21
UnitCount	1
UPCs	724355705129
EANs	0724355705129

Thomas Adès - Piano

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