{"id":729,"date":"2010-05-01T16:28:49","date_gmt":"2010-05-01T16:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2010\/05\/englands_mozart_or_liszt.html"},"modified":"2010-05-01T16:28:49","modified_gmt":"2010-05-01T16:28:49","slug":"englands_mozart_or_liszt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2010\/05\/englands_mozart_or_liszt.html","title":{"rendered":"England’s Mozart or Liszt?"},"content":{"rendered":"


“England’s Mozart” one critic dubbed the young Thomas Ad\u00e8s a few years ago. I very much hoped this was true, as our visitors’ book has an entry for 9-10 September 1978 in firm, legible, scarily grown-up handwriting, the name and address of the six-year-old Thomas, along with those of his mother and younger brother. Now 39, Ad\u00e8s seems at the height of his powers as a composer, with two operas, a piano concerto, a violin concerto and plenty of other orchestral works to his credit. He is also renowned (and in demand) as a conductor. But until April 27<\/font>th <\/font><\/sup>in a piano recital at the Barbican, I had not heard him perform. Now I’d be more inclined to say he is “England’s Liszt,” as he is that (currently) rare thing a composer who is a virtuoso pianist.<\/font><\/p>\n


<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/font><\/div>\n
\"Duchess.png\"<\/span><\/font><\/div>\n

<\/font><\/div>\n
Joan Rodgers as Marg of Arg in “Powder Her Face”<\/font><\/div>\n

<\/font><\/div>\n


\n<\/p>\n


<\/span><\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

         From
\nMozart on the composer\/virtuoso combination was not uncommon, and one can think
\nof plenty of 19<\/font>th<\/font><\/sup> century musicians who qualify from Beethoven, Chopin
\nand Rachmaninov to Saint-Saens. In the 20<\/font>th<\/font><\/sup> century I can think of
\nfar fewer – Britten and Bernstein, Stravinsky and Messiaen. Perhaps I am being
\nobtuse, or don’t know how to get the best out of Google, but I can think of few
\ncontemporary composers who can really dazzle their audience by their playing.
\nAm I wrong? <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/font>I’ve certainly been engaged by Philip Glass and his Ensemble, but you
\nwouldn’t go to Carnegie Hall to hear him perform  solo Jan\u00e1<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/span>cek’s <\/font><\/font><\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/span>Along an Overgrown Path – Book 2, <\/font><\/i>Liszt’s
\nhomage to Wagner <\/font>Isolde’s Liebestod<\/font><\/i>
\nor Prokofiev’s <\/font>Sarcasms<\/font><\/i>, the first
\nhalf of the programme Ad\u00e8s played at Carnegie Hall and repeated at the
\nBarbican. OK, the <\/font>Liebestod<\/font><\/i> was
\nshowing off – but isn’t that what a virtuoso does? Ad\u00e8s played the entire
\nrecital from memory, as well, and here what impressed me most was the
\nProkofiev. Besides that he played one passage with his left hand made into a
\nfist, and his right index finger so powerful that it seemed propelled by a
\nsmall explosive charge, how does anyone manage to learn the score of this
\npiece? How does the human brain even decipher these great ropes of
\nhemidemisemiquavers (mine certainly can’t), let alone memorise great coils of
\nthem?<\/o:p><\/font><\/p>\n

         If
\nin the first half, Ad\u00e8s demonstrated convincingly that the piano is a
\npercussive instrument, in the second half there were concessions to
\nRomanticism, and a display of deep feeling as well of technique. For me the
\nweakest link was Schubert’s <\/font>Allegretto in
\nC minor<\/font><\/i>, for all that it is a beautiful piece, beautifully played. It
\ndidn’t have the solidity or mass of the performer’s own, wonderfully wrought <\/font>Concert Paraphrase on “Powder Her Face”<\/font><\/i>
\nor the puzzling dance-and-hymn juiciness of the Beethoven <\/font>Bagatelles, Op. 126<\/font><\/i>. Two encores were a Liszt Mazurka and his own <\/font>Mazurka no. 3.<\/font><\/i> The audience would have
\nkept him a great deal longer, but the physical strain of the programme was far
\ntoo great to ask for more.<\/o:p><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

         I
\nsaw Tom again the next night, two rows down from me in the audience for <\/font>Powder Her Face<\/font><\/i>, which was being revived
\nat the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio in a brilliant production by Carlos Wagner.
\nThe director had solved some of the problems encountered in the original 1995
\nstaging: Ad\u00e8s had simply written too much music for the action, and some of the
\nmusical interludes resulted in the singers standing around with not enough to
\ndo. No one would want to sacrifice a note of the score written by the (then)
\n24-year-old, and Wagner has invented some terrific stage business, in which
\nwhat the singers do is actually either funny or touching. The opera deals with
\n“Marg of Arg,” the notorious Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose sex life and
\npreferences became a public scandal in her hilarious 1955 divorce from the
\nduke, who offered in evidence against her a photograph of his duchess fellating
\n“the headless man,” (the Polaroid snapshot was focused on the more relevant
\nparts of the person the world later learned was Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). It’s
\nall good dirty fun, and Joan Rodgers’s performance as the duchess was
\nspectacular – indeed the entire cast, and the orchestra, conducted by Timothy
\nRedmond, were superlative, as were the imaginative sets by Conor Murphy. The
\naction is played out on a long set of tapering to the top steps, with the
\nduchess’s hotel bedroom represented by a giant powder compact, which opens and
\nshuts like Venus’s scallop shell.<\/o:p><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

         The
\nhighpoint of Wagner’s added business comes when the duchess is engaging in her
\nfavourite sexual practice with the waiter she’s ordered from Room Service, and
\na young man (the choreographer, Tom Baert) is thrust up between them, and does
\na complete turn to show us that he’s completely naked. It adds just the right
\ntouch of surrealism to Philip Hensher’s wickedly funny libretto and Ad\u00e8s’s hugely
\ninventive score.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“England’s Mozart” one critic dubbed the young Thomas Ad\u00e8s a few years ago. I very much hoped this was true, as our visitors’ book has an entry for 9-10 September 1978 in firm, legible, scarily grown-up handwriting, the name and address of the six-year-old Thomas, along with those of his mother and younger brother. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}