A Taste of the New with a Savouring of the Old
Grady Harp | Los Angeles, CA United States | 06/22/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Thomas Adès is a rather extraordinary artist in that he is equally at home as a performer (pianist) as he is as progressively important contemporary composer. This terrific new recording demonstrates the spectrum of his gifts and while the majority of people who will be attracted to this CD will purchase it for Adès's own Piano Quintet in which he is the pianist, the refreshing aspect of this CD is discovering the very fine pianism he displays in the Schubert Trout Quintet.
Adès's music is accessible, focusing on old forms and broadening those rules to extend the spectrum of rhythm and color. The Piano Quintet (here with the superlative Arditti Quartet) is a brief twenty minutes of three movements that are novel while staying within the borders of convention. Some of the solo work in the various strings is truly beautiful.
Schubert's Trout Quintet is well known and very amply recorded, but Adès, joined by the Belcea Quartet, makes it sing with such airborne grace that the piece sounds fresh and exciting. This version is not background music: the interplay of the instruments creates amazingly clear dialogues and Adès proves himself an accomplished classical pianist. Highly Recommended for both lovers of Adès and of Schubert! Grady Harp, June 05"
Ades' quintet is genuinely fresh and engaging, and the Trout
Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 07/28/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I keep in the back of my mind that Thomas Ades has been an acclaimed composer since his early twenties, but I don't often get around to hearing his music. The challenge facing any modernist is to find an idiom that holds the listener's attention--few of us, even the avid listener, can grasp the theoretical underpinnings of advanced modernism. Ades is fortunate that his idiom feels as rich and forceful as Brhams, then shifts to the spookiness of Shostakovich or the spare harmonies of Webern. He's not a magpie, exactly, yet we're constantly hearing echoes of music we already love. In fact, the 20 min. Quintet (more than half of it devoted to the first movement) feels like an emotional extension of Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, in that the lines tend to be clean and based on memorable melodies. Ades has 'liberated the dissonance' more than Shostakovich; both love to use strings for ghostly sound effects. Highly enjoyable.
EMI didn't include the Schubert Trout Quintet merely to sweeten the medicine. Ades is an accomplished classical pianist and conductor. Just as the Arditti Qt. served him well in his own piece, the Belcea Qt. are quite stylish Schubertians. This reading is light and nimble, and there's unusal happiness in the playing. It's refeshing to hear such a carefree account. Ades performs as a member of the group, not a front-and-center soloist backed by strings. The close meshing of five minds is one of the highlights of this delightful performance, the best new Trout I've heard since Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax made theirs on CBS."
Thomas Adès as equally brilliant composer and pianist, contr
Discophage | France | 09/19/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I find it always interesting to hear the kind of coupling which brings together an all-time classic - in the present case Schubert's "Trout" Quintet - and a contemporary piece, related to the first by theme, construction and/or instrumental combination. Other cases I can think of are the Brodsky Quartet's recording of Schubert's "Death & the Maiden" paired with George Crumb's "Black Angels" (Teldec, Franz Schubert: String Quartet In D Minor D.810 "Death and the Maiden" / George Crumb: Black Angels, for Electric String Quartet, 13 Images from the Dark Land - Brodsky Quartet), the Petersen's Quartet pairing of the same Schubert piece with Siegfried Matthus' "Maiden and Death" Quartet (Capriccio, Schubert "Death and the Maiden", Matthus "Maiden and Death" / Petersen Quartet), or Peter Serkin and Guarneri Quartet's Brahms and Henze piano quintets (Philips,incomprehensibly not listed here, you will find it on the European sister companies under ASIN B000023Y1F).
Here the instrumental combination is not exactly the same in both works, as Thomas Adès' piano quintet (here played with the Arditti Quartet) uses the traditional string quartet rather than, like Schubert, substituting the double bass to the second violin. The CD's notes by Tom Service brilliantly expound the structural relations between both works, calling the "Trout" Quintet "an essay in displacement and unpredictability that finds a contemporary resonance in the slipperiness of Adès's piece", but I am not sure this is be really perceptible to the layman. With its use of thematic blocks, its clouds of pizzicatti, its quasi-hoquetus rythms, high-register writing and recurrence of tempo accelerations, Adès's composition reminds me of Ligeti's later style, especially his horn trio.
So the real unifying factor is composer/pianist Thomas Adès, who proves himself to be not only the brilliant up-and-coming composer we know of, but an outstanding pianist as well; with members of the Belcea Quartet and bassist Corin Long, he contributes a fine, youthful, high-strung version of Schubert's masterpiece, which reminds me overall of the kind of approach George Szell and members of the Budapest Quartet applied to it in their 1946 live recording at the Library of Congress, now on Bridge records (Brahms / Schubert : Szell / Budapest Quartet).
The opening Allegro is urgent, muscular, dynamic, almost anxiously hurried, with very little of the good-natured geniality which marks interpretations such as Curzon's with the Wiener Octet (Decca, Schubert: Trout Quintet; Death and the Maiden) or Richter and the Borodin Quartet's (EMI, Schubert: "Trout" Quintet, "Wanderer" Fantasy, etc.), but not unlike Arthur Schnabel and members of the Pro Arte Quartet in their seminal pre-war recording (Schubert and Schnabel, Vol I; Piano Quintet in A, D. 667 ('Trout'); Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959). In keeping with that approach, the Belcea strings, as picked up by the sound engineer, have a rather dry tone - not that their phrasings lack feeling, but their sound production doesn't have the kind of lyrical fullness brought by others: try the cello-violin duet at 1:55 for instance. The viola-cello triplets at 0:59 sound like a dashing train. The ensuing Andante is again lean, almost anxious in the viola-cello cantilena (1:23), with none of the ample lyricism which graces other versions (Glazer-Fine Arts on Boston Skyline Schubert: Trout Quintet/Death and the Maiden Quartet, Richter-Borodin, you name it), and the fp accents at 1:06 are explosive rather than subdued as they are at the hands of others. But there is a wonderfully hushed quality to the passage before the repeat, starting at 2:25. True to Schubert's Presto indication, the Scherzo is brisk, lively and light, well-accented, almost hard-driven - reminiscent of what Curzon and the Vienna Octet members did with it. But unlike them, Adès and the Belcea commendably apply no slow down to the central trio (Schubert prescribes none), which has a great rhythmic bounce rather than coy mawkishness. Again no mawkish dragging along in the delivery of the famous "Trout" theme, and the ensuing variations are appropriately light and dynamic, with always perfect and beautiful intonation from 1st fiddler Corina Belcea, a display of power almost verging on violence in the fourth variation and a jaunty, spirited coda. Brisk again is the Finale, with a remarkably light and transparent piano touch from Adès; and a curio: the musicians exercice an option that I have encountered only in the Claudio Arrau-Juilliard Quartet 1964 live recording at the Library of Congress reissued on Doremi (Juilliard String Quartet, Vol. 1): the repeat of the movement's first part (the second part being the repeat of the first in another tonality, you really get to hear it three times).
Not then, because of its radical interpretive choices, the version to have if you have only one, but one that is treasurable precisely for this - and for its coupling.
"
Track Listings (14) - Disc #1