Ross Concerto

Composers writing concertos must contend with the genre’s history of hoary
theatrics.Illustration by Sergiy Maidukov

Musical Events
March 25, 2019 Issue
The Concerto Challenge

John Adams and Thomas Adès offer new takes on a beloved form.
By Alex Ross
Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential

feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far
into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic
opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing
double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold
gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a
supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability
of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival
trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from
Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a
long black box.
Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady

demand for them, always threatening to become a glut—must contend
with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics. In the disillusioned twentieth
century, the standard Romantic narrative of heroic struggle fell from
fashion. The soloist more often acted the part of a solitary wanderer,
traversing the damaged landscapes of modernity. Alban Berg’s Violin
Concerto, composed in 1935, follows a trajectory of crisis, lamentation,
and dissolution. In Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto, written three decades
later, the soloist is all but trampled underfoot by a rampaging orchestra.
Two significant recent concertos dismantle the duality of self and

community that has long governed the form. Chaya Czernowin’s
“Guardian,” for cello and orchestra, inverts the polarity, so that, in the
composer’s words, “the cello grows to include the orchestra within its
resonant body.” The solo instrument is amplified, allowing the slightest
touches of bow on string to carry into the hall. Liza Lim’s “Speak, Be
Silent” places a solo violin amid an ensemble dominated by wind, brass,
and percussion. Lim’s extraordinary ear for timbre and texture brings
about a synthesis of disparate voices, illustrating the work’s epigraph,
from Rumi: “Just remember, when you’re in union, / you don’t have to
fear / that you’ll be drained.”
The ever-formidable British composer Thomas Adès takes a

different tack in his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which had its
première at the Boston Symphony on March 7th, with a Carnegie Hall
performance to follow on March 20th. Here is an unabashed showpiece
in the grand manner, replete with thundering double octaves, frame-
rattling two-hand chords, and keyboard-sweeping glissandos. A program
note written by Adès is almost comically old-fashioned, inviting the
audience to listen for first and second themes, development and
recapitulation, and so on. Yet the work is far more than an exercise in
nostalgia. It is an unruly romp across familiar terrain—at once a paean to
tradition and a sophisticated burlesque of it.
The soloist at the first performances, which Adès conducted, was the
Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein. Few concertos have ever been
more immaculately tailored to their first interpreter. Gerstein is a
heavyweight performer, having conquered Liszt’s monstrously
difficult Transcendental Études. In 2017, he joined the Boston
Symphony for a rare performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s even more
monstrous Piano Concerto. (A recording of that outing was recently
released by the Myrios Classics label.) Some of Adès’s madcap writing
in the concerto may doff a hat to Busoni’s Mephistophelian masterpiece.
Adès also nods to the fact that Gerstein is a serious jazz player, a
brilliant exponent of Gershwin. It can’t be an accident that the
concerto’s opening gesture brushes against the intervals of Gershwin’s
“I Got Rhythm.”
The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the
scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme
that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were
sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn. Trumpets and trombones join in
with wah-wah mutes. Adès’s fractal orchestration and atomizing
interplay of intervals keep the Jazz Age ambience at a distance: nothing
stays fixed. In the recapitulation, the Bette Davis theme assumes grander
proportions, with solemn, unmuted horns in attendance. The first theme
returns in the coda, amid delirious orchestral commentary. A pell-mell
duet of piccolo and xylophone had me on the brink of laughing out loud.
The middle movement, marked “Andante gravemente,” plunges into

melancholy. A funereal procession of winds and brass, more or less in
B-flat minor, leads into a courtly, neo-Baroque theme. An intricately
expressive countermelody floats high into the piano’s upper register,
adorned with Chopinesque curlicues. An atmosphere of dejection
gathers as the piano becomes fixated on a three-note pattern and the
orchestra sinks into the bass regions. Many concertos draw a contrast
between bravura and sorrowful moods; here the division is stark enough
that it suggests the musical equivalent of manic depression.
The finale begins where the first movement left off, in a state of
controlled chaos. The orchestra squawks and snorts, a clarinet
caterwauls, the piano cartwheels through complex polyrhythms, themes
devolve into disjointed practice scales; an attempt at a noble chorale is
pitched too high and becomes ridiculous. These antics lead to a crisis
and another depressive standstill. A joyously anarchic coda overcomes
the lingering shadows. The failed chorale assumes properly grandiose
proportions, although it is undercut by an over-the-top cascade of double
octaves, doubled goofily by glockenspiel. A cracking whip and a
thudding bass drum bring this sublime conjuration to an end. If anyone
in the audience guffawed, a huge ovation covered it.
The same week that the Adès made its début in Boston, the Los Angeles
Philharmonic introduced a new concerto by John Adams, titled “Must
the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” Yuja Wang was the soloist, and
Gustavo Dudamel conducted. Adams’s playful title, quoting a remark
apocryphally attributed to Martin Luther, led me to expect another
example of what the composer has called his “trickster” mode—the most
notorious instance being “Grand Pianola Music,” from 1982, in which
Beethoven’s “Emperor” arpeggios are thrown into a mixer with
Rachmaninoff and ragtime. Some of that spirit persists in “Must the
Devil,” but it turns out to be one of Adams’s darker, more abstract
utterances.
The piece begins in trickster style, with the soloist playing a funky
ostinato modelled on Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme and a
detuned honky-tonk piano adding offbeat accents. As this jollity grinds
on, though, it takes on a machinelike brutality. A composer who has
long used popular material to poke at the solemnity of the classical
tradition here seems to be exposing the dominating urge behind much
pop music. One hears echoes of apocalyptic episodes in Adams’s latter-
day stage works: the doom-laden Corn Dance of “Doctor Atomic,” the
malignant Americana of “Girls of the Golden West.”
Whereas the slow movement of the Adès concerto suggests an inward

despair, the middle section of “Must the Devil” tries to escape into a
meditative sphere. The piano is given a delicately meandering
unaccompanied melody; Wang, virtuosic even in pianissimo, made it
glisten in the air. The orchestra seems uncertain how to respond, and a
full-blown lyrical episode fails to develop. The piano, ringing variations
on its theme, falls into a bouncing tarantella rhythm. The orchestra
seizes on this playful pattern, giving it a monotonous, ominous thrust.
Thus begins the finale, which resumes and intensifies the first
movement’s abrasive drive.
The ending is abrupt and chilling. Three times, the strings intervene with
sustained D’s in stacked octaves, as if issuing warnings. A brutal last
stampede is cut short by a blaring dissonance in the horns and a
reverberating chime—an alarm like the one that sounds in “Doctor
Atomic” just before the final detonation. On the East Coast, Adès offers
a mirage of joy; on the West Coast, Adams stares into the storm. ♦
Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2019, issue.

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Composers writing concertos must contend with the genre’s history of hoary

theatrics.Illustration by Sergiy Maidukov

The Concerto Challenge

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential

Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady

Two significant recent concertos dismantle the duality of self and

The ever-formidable British composer Thomas Adès takes a

The middle movement, marked “Andante gravemente,” plunges into

Whereas the slow movement of the Adès concerto suggests an inward

Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2019, issue.

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