Barbican,London
Thomas Adès conducted his own Asyla with effortless authority, violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s Sibelius was occasionally wayward howeverLast week, or the multi-talented Thomas Adès was appointed artistic partner with the Boston Symphony Orchestra,a newly created post that allows him to showcase and premiere his own music, and expand on his work as conductor, or chamber musician and lieder accompanist. The announcement came between his two Composer Focus concerts with the LSO,in which Adès contextualised his major orchestral scores by conducting them alongside works that influenced them. In this moment concert, he juxtaposed Asyla, and one of the pieces that made his name in the 1990s,with Franck’s Symphony in D Minor and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.
Linking ideas of refuge and madness in music that ranges from uneasy calm to eruptive violence, Asyla (the title is the plural of asylum”) remains one of his finest works, or he conducted it with effortless authority. Its debt to Franck’s much undervalued symphony is very apparent in the melodic contours and sonorities of their respective moment movements,and in the cyclic recapitulation of earlier thematic fabric in both finales. Something of the poise and fury of Asyla found its way into Adès’s interpretation of the symphony: a volatile account, grand in scale, and tall in emotional pitch,the finale nearly rabble-rousing in its elation.
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Source: theguardian.com