The BSO, Awkward Now & Then
Beethoven Bookends For Adès New Work

By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 17, 2008

Thomas Adès, 37, is one of the biggest stars in the contemporary music firmament. But you wouldn't necessarily know that if you attended his appearance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night. This is nothing against Adès, and nothing against the BSO, which, under David Zinman and now Marin Alsop, has developed a praiseworthy emphasis on contemporary work. Rather, it is a criticism of the way big institutions in general present new music.

Here's the problem: You're an orchestra, and you have a big name like Adès. He is a composer, a pianist, and a conductor; he has just finished a season as Carnegie Hall's resident composer; and he is coming to town to conduct a program for you. But audiences don't like new music -- that's the conventional wisdom, at least -- so you don't want to offer too many pieces by him on the program. Alsop's inaugural season has made a point of juxtaposing the works of living composers with the symphonies of Beethoven; you have Adès conduct two of the symphonies, the First and Fourth, as bookends to his own 20-minute Violin Concerto. The pieces have a relatively light scoring in common, giving the whole thing a chamber-music lightness to leaven the violin concerto's intensity.

So what's the problem? It's that this presentation leaves unanswered the basic existential question: Why are we listening to this? Why do we want to hear this gifted composer conduct Beethoven? What is the relation between the Beethoven symphonies and the Violin Concerto? In most musical genres, answering this kind of question is an integral part of a performance. In the orchestra world, they are frequently addressed as they were in Baltimore: In a video interview on the orchestra's Web site, which may not have been seen by many people in the audience. (Adès said that the Beethoven symphonies, "very classical and fresh," were a nice counterbalance to his own piece, "quite lush and romantic," yet with a kind of classical structure.)

Certainly the concerto was the highlight of the evening. Played by Anthony Marwood, for whom it was written, it begins as if in mid-sentence, with agitated figures from the violin scrolling up and down the strings over scribblings from the rest of the orchestra. The form, Adès said in a program note, is that of an altarpiece triptych: two small movements framing a larger central one that is the piece's emotional heart. This second movement has a big, heroic opening and takes a while to work itself down into the gentler yearning ache that is an Adagio movement's traditional emotional temperature.

Adès's music has always had a hyperkinetic energy that reflects the composer's youth: It is bursting with ideas and events, to the point of sometimes wearing out a listener. This concerto has a lot going on; but it also holds its course, as if the violin soloist were pulling on the reins to keep it on track. Rather than a singing line, the violin part is made up of individual strokes layered one atop the other, carving out its territory. It offers not an illusion of weightlessness but a metaphor of effort: rising above the growls of a tuba, damping down the other instruments to a general petering out that ends the second movement, leading the rise to the tight kick of percussion that ends the first and third. Yet interlaced with the other instruments, this part does not wear its difficulty on its sleeve so that Marwood's impressive performance was veritably understated.

Unlike some composers, Adès is a real conductor, with a level of ease on the podium. He is just not a particularly distinguished one. He led the Beethovens briskly, especially the First, with the forward drive audible in his own music, though occasionally at the expense of detail (there were particularly muddy passages in the Fourth). He was more interested in the building of tension -- at the start of the final movement of the First, with inquiring lines from the solo strings, or in the long dark introduction to the Fourth -- than in its release, in both works, into Haydnesque cascades, which he let fall like anticlimaxes. It was all very fine, but somewhat puzzling: The new work emerged like a tantalizing glimpse of something on which the program did not follow through.

But the BSO deserves credit for presenting this kind of thing to begin with. It strikes me that I often come out of BSO concerts with thoughts that come off as critical of the orchestra; and this is because the orchestra is offering things that are thought-provoking. It is certainly addressing the right issues and posing some of the questions that need asking, and this is far better than the alternative, which is to avoid the discomfort of growth by presenting a steady diet of standards. I look forward to seeing if it takes the discussion to the next level in the future.