Barbican Hall Scharoun Ensemble Berlin Thomas Adès piano ...

Part of Traced Overhead: The Musical World of Thomas Adès
Tuesday 17 April 2007, 7.30pm
Scharoun Ensemble Berlin
Thomas Adès piano
Simon Keenlyside baritone
Beethoven Piano Trio in D major, Op.70 No.1 ‘Ghost’
Adès Piano Quintet
interval 20’
Adès Court Studies from The Tempest
Mahler arr. Tarkmann Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Barbican Hall
The Barbican Centre is provided by the
City of London Corporation as part of its
contribution to the cultural life of London
and the nation.
The Great Performers 2007-2008 season is now on sale.
For full details visit www.barbican.org.uk/greatperformers0708 where
you can listen to soundclips and watch the Barbican’s Head of Music
Robert van Leer introduce the new season.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Trio in D major, Op.70 No.1 ‘Ghost’
I. Allegro vivace e con brio
II. Largo assai ed espressivo
III. Presto
The piano trio was a useful genre for a musician who
was making a name for himself as both pianist and
composer among the Viennese aristocracy, and
Beethoven published a set of three such works as his
Op.1, in 1795. Two years later came his trio with clarinet.
By the time he returned to the straight piano-violin-cello
trio, more than a decade further on, he was very much
more a composer than a pianist, and this is reflected in
the texture, scale and weight of the three trios that
resulted: the pair of Op.70 and the singleton ‘Archduke’.
The ‘Ghost’ Trio owes its name to its slow movement, in D
minor, and to a remark by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny,
that ‘it resembles an appearance from the Underworld.
One could think not inappropriately of the first
appearance of the ghost in Hamlet.’ If this was a guess, it
was a good one. While working on the trio, in 1808,
Beethoven was also making sketches for an opera to be
based on one of Shakespeare’s plays – not Hamlet, in
Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
Piano Quintet, Op.20
Writing in 2000 for the following year’s Melbourne
Festival, Adès may have wanted to start the new
millennium afresh. Here for the first time in his output was
an instrumental work of long continuity, a work that,
Notes
Beethoven
fact, but one that also has a ghost in it: Macbeth. The
savage discords and the tremolandos are plausible
manifestations of the Gothic style, especially when
combined with a degree of thematic repetition that could
be heard as obsessive or possessed. Perhaps, too,
Czerny’s attention was caught by those moments where
the pianist’s left hand stalks the bass (‘A figure like your
father,’ as Horatio tells Hamlet, ‘with solemn march goes
slow and stately by’).
No less remarkable is the first movement, whose stern
opening gesture seems to impel everything that follows –
not as an idea to be imitated but more as one to be
avoided. From one extreme here the music goes at once
to another: from short ejaculation to legato phrase, from
clattering tutti to solo, from piano-dominated texture to
strings, from loud to soft. But that initial challenge won’t,
can’t be forgotten. The finale is, as so often in
Beethoven’s chamber music, a rondo with development.
Adès
though it includes a full repetition of one big section,
moves masterfully forward through a span of 20 minutes
(sometimes on two or more fronts at once), and
generates so much momentum, such a richness of
3

Notes
possibility, that its ending seems brutally abrupt as well
as necessary.
The scheme looks absurdly conventional. An introduction,
for the first violin alone, is followed by the textbook
phases of a sonata form: exposition (repeated, as it was
classically), development and recapitulation. But the
music is not made in a textbook way at all. The basic
ideas are very compact. It is perhaps no surprise that they
should be so malleable, for little things have many ways
to change, but it is astonishing that they should remain,
through all their changes, so memorable. The
introduction, for instance, is made of two tiny elements
that keep their characters even though they are right
away interfering with one another: a rise in broken chords
and a falling scale fragment. In their dialogues and
interpenetrations they create what might be called the
main theme, but, being constituted of transformation, this
theme cannot keep still. Perhaps Bartók was the
inspiration for a sonata form built by musical corpuscles
in constant action – though the music does not sound like
Bartók at all. It sounds like Adès, and not least when,
towards the end of the five-minute exposition, the material
makes the poignant discovery within itself of a simple
tune, like a children’s song, or a remembered hymn.
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Pressure for all this change comes partly from the
harmony, but the Quintet is also a vigorously rhythmic
piece, where again everything comes from
fundamentals. A lot is done with the iambic pattern,
unstressed-stressed. From this comes a maze of unusual
metres, often with the piano and the strings in conflict
with one another, musical tugs of war. But the strong
beats are always strongly present for the music to be
thrown against.
The ‘development section’ is initiated by the piano with
an upside-down version of the main theme: chords
falling, rising scales. Soon there is turmoil, harmonic and
rhythmic, with all five players in their own metrical
frames, always altering and sometimes interlocking. Out
of this comes a long slow section, with the piano only
intermittently present.
Then the first violin goes back to the broken chords that
got the whole thing going, only to find them a little
different and to be played pizzicato. Everything else is
more than a little different, and there is a prevailing urge
to finish, to make this not so much recapitulation as coda.
Thomas Adès
Court Studies from The Tempest
I. The False Duke – II. The Prince – III. The King – IV. The False Duke’s Defeat – V. The Counsellor – VI. The King’s Grief
Written in 2005, the year after the first performance of
Adès’s operatic treatment of The Tempest, this eightminute
movement for clarinet, violin, cello and piano
scans the leading figures who arrive on Prospero’s
island: the usurper Antonio, Ferdinand and his father, the
King of Naples, and the honest old counsellor Gonzalo.
Here they are, compressed into designs as crisp and
stylised as on a hand of (court) cards. Antonio is figured
interval 20’
first in a slippery dance, then in a sneaking one;
Ferdinand’s music is alternately assertive and sweet; the
King’s a drooping shadowplay between two lines. A
shock fanfare introduces them, intervenes again before
Gonzalo’s amiable portrait, and, greatly decelerated,
provides the material for the quasi-passacaglia with
which the work ends.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
arr. Andreas N. Tarkmann (b. 1956)
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
I. Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht
II. Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld
III. Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer
IV. Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz
Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (‘Songs of a
Wayfarer’) travel through many dimensions of time. They
had a travelling growth, begun in the mid-1880s as songs
with piano but not definitively completed until shortly
before the first performance, which was of the
composer’s orchestrated version, in Berlin in 1896. They
thus travelled with Mahler from the threshold of his First
Symphony (to which the second song is related) up to the
time when he was finishing his Third, and the texts, which
he wrote himself, are close to the folk poetry that was on
his mind at the time – especially the early 19th-century
collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic
Horn’). The settings, too, hark back to that same early
Romantic period, and in particular to Schubert’s
I.
Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,
Fröhliche Hochzeit macht,
Hab’ ich meinen traurigen Tag!
Geh’ ich in mein Kämmerlein,
Dunkles Kämmerlein!
Weine! Wein’! Um meinen Schatz,
Un meinen lieben Schatz!
Blümlein blau! Blümlein blau!
Verdorre nicht, verdorre nicht!
Vöglein süss! Vöglein süss!
Du singst auf grüner Heide!
‘Ach! wie ist die Welt so schön!
Ziküth! Ziküth!’
Notes
Mahler
Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’). Here again is a traveller
singing out his hopes and (even more) his anxieties, and
finding them mirrored in the world around him as he
passes. The songs also travel harmonically, from key to
key. And they go on travelling in this arrangement.
A version with 10 players was created in 1919 for
Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances.
Tonight’s adaptation was made by the prolific German
arranger Andreas N. Tarkmann in 1998, and deepens
the music’s Schubertian tinge by setting the
accompaniment out for the line-up of the earlier
composer’s Octet: strings with clarinet, horn and
bassoon.
I.
When my sweetheart has her wedding,
happy wedding,
that’s for me a rotten day.
Take myself, I do, to my little room,
dark little room,
and weep, weep for my girl,
my lovely girl!
Little flower of blue! Of blue!
Do not fade! Do not fade!
Sweet bird! Sweet bird!
Who sings on the green heath!
‘Oh, how beautiful the world is!
Ta-ra! Ta-ra!’
please turn page quietly …
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Notes
Singet nicht! Blühet nicht!
Lenz ist ja vorbei!
Alles Singen ist nun aus!
Des Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh’,
Denk’ ich an mein Leide!
An mein Leide!
II.
Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld,
Tau noch auf den Gräsern hing,
Sprach zu mir der lüst’ge Fink:
‘Ei, du! Gelt?
Guten Morgen! Ei, Gelt? Du!
Wird’s nicht eine schöne Welt?
Zink! Zink! Schön und flink!
Wie mir doch die Welt gefällt!’
Auch die Glockenblum’ am Feld
Hat mir lustig guter Ding’,
Mit den Glöckchen, klinge, kling,
Ihren Morgengruss geschellt:
‘Wird’s nicht eine schöne Welt?
Kling! Kling! Schönes Ding!
Wie mir doch die Welt gefällt!’
Und da fing im Sonnenschein
Gleich die Welt zu funkeln an:
Alles, Ton und Farbe gewann!
Im Sonnenschein!
Blum’ und Vogel, gross und klein!
‘Guten Tag! Guten Tag!
Ist’s nicht eine schöne Welt?
Ei, du! Gelt? Schöne Welt!’
Nun fängt auch mein Glück wohl an?!
Nein! Nein! Das ich mein’,
Mir nimmer blühen kann!
III.
Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,
Ein Messer in meiner Brust.
O weh! O weh!
Das scheid’t so tief
In jede Freud’ und jede Lust,
So tief! So tief!
Es schneid’t so weh und tief!
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Do not sing! Do not bloom!
Spring’s already gone!
No more singing can there be!
Evenings, when I go to sleep,
I think over my sorrows!
My sorrows!
II.
Went this morning o’er the field,
dew still hanging on the leaves;
spoke to me a cheerful bird:
‘Hey, you! OK?
Good morning! Hey, you!
Isn’t this a lovely world?
Cheep! Cheep! Fair and bright!
Just like me the world’s so pleased!’
And the bluebells were in flower,
struck me as a funny thing,
little bells a-ringing, ring,
ringing with their morning call:
‘Isn’t this a lovely world?
Ting! Ting! Lovely thing!
Just like me the world’s so pleased!’
And beneath the shining sun
All the world began to glow:
All with colour and with sound,
The shining sun!
Flower and bird, big and small,
‘Good day to you, good day to you!
Isn’t this a lovely world?
Hey, you! OK?’
Now at last will my luck come in?
No, no, that I know,
that will never bloom for me!
III.
I have a glowing dagger,
a dagger in my breast.
Alas! Alas!
It cuts so deep
In ev’ry joy, in ev’ry hope,
so deep, so deep!
It cuts so sharp and deep!

Ach, was ist das für ein böser Gast!
Nimmer hält er Ruh’,
Nimmer hält er Rast!
Nicht bei Tag,
Nicht bei Nacht, wenn ich schlief!
O weh! O weh! O weh!
Wenn ich in den Himmel seh’,
Seh’ ich zwei blaue Augen steh’n!
O weh! O weh!
Wenn ich im gelben Felde geh’,
Seh’ ich von fern das blonde Haar
Im Winde weh’n! O weh! O weh!
Wenn ich aus dem Traum auffahr’
Und höre klingen ihr silbern Lachen,
O weh! O weh!
Ich wollt’ ich läg’ auf der schwarzen Bahr’,
Könnt’ nimmer, nimmer die Augen aufmachen!
IV.
Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz,
Die haben mich in die weite Welt geschickt.
Da musst’ ich Abschied nehmen
Vom allerliebsten Platz!
O Augen blau, warum habt ihr mich angeblickt?
Nun hab’ ich ewig Leid und Grämen!
Ich bin ausgegangen in stiller Nacht,
Wohl über die dunkle Heide.
Hat mir niemand Ade gesagt, Ade!
Mein Gesell’ war Lieb’ und Leide!
Auf der Strasse steht ein Lindenbaum,
Da hab’ ich zum ersten Mal im Schlaf geruht!
Unter dem Lindenbaum!
Der hat seine Blühen über mich geschneit
Da wusst’ ich nicht, wie das Leben tut
War Alles, alles wieder gut!
Alles! Alles!
Lieb’ und Leid, und Welt, und Traum!
Ah, such a fearful guest to have,
Never letting up,
never letting rest!
Not by day,
not by night, when I sleep!
Alas! Alas! Alas!
When I look up to the sky,
there I see two eyes of blue.
Alas! Alas!
When I go into the golden fields,
I see from afar, waving,
blonde hair in the wind. Alas! Alas!
When I rise up in my dreams
And hear her silver laugh,
Alas! Alas!
I wish I lay on a coal-black bier,
and never could open my eyes more!
IV.
The two blue eyes of my darling girl
have sent me out to travel the world.
So I must say goodbye
to the place I love best of all!
O eyes of blue, why did you look at me?
Sorrows and griefs are now my lot.
I’m going out into the peaceful night,
over the darkening heath.
Nobody’s said to me: Goodbye!
My companion was my love and sorrow!
By the road stood a lime tree,
where for the first time I slept in peace.
Under the lime tree,
which snowed on me its flowers,
I forgot what life does,
and everything, everything was good again!
Everything! Everything!
Love and sorrow, and world and dream!
Translation: Paul Griffiths © 2007
Notes
Programme notes by Paul Griffiths © 2007
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About the performers
Tracing Thomas Adès
To begin at the beginning, or at the beginnings, a lot of
Thomas Adès’s works start out with some tiny corpuscle
of sound that is repeated, and repeated again, and
repeated again, but already it is changing. Through the
repetitions a process is being set up, and there may well
be something in the bass steering that process. The
shape is recognisably the same, but it is mutating all the
time, and it is going somewhere. It might be as simple a
thing as a fall from one note to another, or a rising bit of
scale, or a bar of dance rhythm. But the process, which
started right away, will have made it seem instantly fresh,
magical, a new beginning.
How does he do it? Harmony is the key: harmony that is
‘neither atonal nor tonal’, as György Ligeti said of his
own, or, perhaps more exactly, harmony that knows
other tonal rules than those of the old keys – though it
certainly knows those rules too, and plays with them.
Ligeti is also one point of reference for Adès’s rhythm,
which is at once elaborate and ramshackle, precisionengineered
and on the point of collapse – collapse into
confusion or into the daemonic pulsation that will often
arrive in his music from somewhere else: the dance floor.
Other sources for Adès’s harmony would have to include
the French Spectralist composers, with their shimmering
sonorities modelled on the overtone spectra of sounds –
though Adès has been unusually bold and original in
recognising how spectra could be trimmed to deliver,
hey presto, common chords, complete with possibilities
of new life instilled in them. To the Spectralists, Ligeti and
Popstarz one could add other forebears, of whom some
are assembled around Adès’s music in this series:
Sibelius and Nancarrow, Stravinsky and Kurtág,
Schumann and Janác˘ek.
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Adès
Manifest as all these reflections will be, what is strange
and wonderful is the freedom from irony. As with the
small elements from which his music is made, so it is with
things borrowed that their reuse refreshes them. A grand
harmonic veer may signal Sibelius, but there is none of
the old 20th-century’s bother about this sort of reference.
Echoes from the past are proving the habitability of a
new world.
Assailing that world – tracing its continents that float
overhead and glisten in so many harmonic lights – is
easier for the ears than for words. Adès’s music holds out
an old promise that has widely been withdrawn (one
understands the attraction Ligeti and Kurtág hold for
him), of being fathomable. It not only attracts but conveys
us, even if into curved spaces and down wonky
perspectives, and convinces us that eventually it will be
lucid to its ultimate recesses.
Sounding on from the past here are not only traits from
earlier composers but ancient ideas suddenly
replenished and brimming: theme, development, a tune
as simple as a nursery rhyme but never heard before, a
chord progression that moves powerfully forward in a
quite new direction. As the private jokes and allusions of
his earlier pieces have fallen away – things that helped
make those pieces at once entrancing and maddening –
so the music has become clearer without losing its
ambiguity, which now depends on a richness of
meanings infolded but no longer encrypted.
Always scintillating and at once enthralling, Adès’s music
has come to yield more and more on repeated listening,
and one wonders to what extent his confidence that this
could happen was bolstered by the immediacy with
which his works were recorded when he was still in his

twenties. What was criticised at the time as hype, and
potentially dangerous for an artist so young, may in fact
have speeded up his growth.
Doubtless there will be further change, in ways
unforeseeable. But Adès, at 36, is already the consistent
master of a style that is – despite the echoes and
reflections, which in any case are probably never quite
what they seem – identifiable and unique. He has a
genius for the big miniature – the piece that lasts just a
few minutes, within which it thoroughly explores some
new sound combination or compositional tactic, or else
tackles an old one in a new way. Many of his pieces from
the Nineties are of this kind, whether self-standing or
contained within larger works (Powder Her Face, which
was his first opera, or Asyla, effectively his first
symphony). But he has always had a sure command, too,
of larger forms, continuous and capacious, and
beguilingly persuasive.
Even so, what may be his most valuable characteristic,
and certainly his rarest, is that he can bring candour into
a context of sophistication. The assurance that allows him
to hold musical conversation with eminent composers
two or three generations older, to programme his music,
as he does here, with the marbled great, and to
anticipate an audience that will want to come to his music
again and again, that assurance, it may be, is what gives
him access to the very frankest kinds of musical
expression. Few other composers of today could have
exited today’s cynicism sufficiently to produce a fullblown
love duet, as Adès does in his second opera, The
Tempest. Few could conjure, or appropriately stage, the
kind of naked melody that is cropping up more and more
in Adès’s music, even as that music deepens.
Simplicity in our time is the hardest thing to achieve. Here
in Adès’s music it is happening, time and again.
Paul Griffiths © 2007
For more information visit
www.barbican.org.uk/tracedoverhead or
www.fabermusic.com
About the performers
Thomas Adès piano
Born in London, where he lives,
Thomas Adès studied piano at
the Guildhall School of Music &
Drama, and read music at King’s
College, Cambridge. Among his
best known works are Living
Toys, Arcadiana, and Asyla – a
commission for Sir Simon Rattle
and the CBSO (1997) which enjoyed immediate and
subsequent international succcess. Tevot, his latest
orchestral work, features as part of the Berliner
Philharmoniker’s current tour.
Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face, has been performed
around the world, televised and recorded. Most of the
composer’s music has been recorded by EMI, with whom
Adès has a contract as composer, pianist and conductor.
His second opera, The Tempest, was commissioned by
the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and was
premiered there under the baton of the composer in
2004; it was revived at Covent Garden last month.
In demand worldwide as a conductor and pianist, Adès is
a renowned interpreter of his own music, while his
performances and recordings of other composers have
also been critically acclaimed. His chamber music
collaborators include Ian Bostridge and the Belcea
Quartet and he has conducted many orchestras and
ensembles including Birmingham Contemporary Music
Group, with which he has a close association. He has been
Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival since 1999. He is
the featured composer this spring in the Présences Festival
in Paris, where 23 of his works are being programmed and
broadcast in just under a month, in performances involving
over 700 musicians. Later this year Adès is the focus of
Oslo’s Ultima Festival, and in 2007/08 he undertakes a
major residency at Carnegie Hall, New York.
The music of Thomas Adès has attracted wide
international recognition including, most recently, the
2000 Grawemeyer Award for Asyla (the largest
international prize for composition, here awarded to the
youngest recipient), the 2001 Hindemith Prize, and a
2005 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for The Tempest.
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About the performers
Simon Keenlyside baritone
Simon Keenlyside was born in
London, studied zoology at
Cambridge and singing with John
Cameron at the Royal Northern
College of Music in Manchester.
He has sung Pelléas (San
Francisco, Geneva, Madrid, New
York, Paris, Salzburg); Mozart’s
Count Almaviva (Teatro alla Scala,
Milan, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Vienna,
Munich); Papageno (Scottish Opera, Paris, La Scala,
Metropolitan Opera, New York, Salzburg Festival, Royal
Opera, Vienna); Hamlet (Geneva, Royal Opera,
Barcelona); Marcello (Vienna, Munich, Royal Opera,
Metropolitan Opera); Wolfram (Munich and Tokyo);
Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Brussels); Billy Budd (Royal Opera,
English National Opera, Vienna); Don Giovanni
(Brussels, Ferrara, Zurich, Royal Opera, Vienna, Munich
and Tokyo); and Posa (Madrid, Munich and Vienna).
He sang Prospero in the premiere and recent revival of
Thomas Adès’s The Tempest and in the premiere of
Lorin Maazel’s 1984, both under the composer (Royal
Opera House). He will return to the Vienna State Opera
(Eugene Onegin); Munich (Wolfram, Count Almaviva,
Posa); Metropolitan Opera (Count Almaviva); Barcelona
(Don Giovanni); and the Royal Opera House (Pelléas,
Posa, Papageno and Oreste).
Concert engagements have taken him to many leading
orchestras while he has appeared in recital the world
over, including at the major festivals. Recordings have
included the roles of Papageno with Sir Charles
Mackerras, Count Almaviva with René Jacobs, Don
Giovanni with Claudio Abbado, Billy Budd with Richard
Hickox, Marcello with Riccardo Chailly, as well as Des
Knaben Wunderhorn with Sir Simon Rattle and recital
discs of Schubert, Schumann and Strauss with Malcolm
Martineau and Graham Johnson. He is now an exclusive
recording artist for Sony BMG. In 2006 Simon Keenlyside
won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in
Opera.
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Scharoun Ensemble Berlin
The Scharoun Ensemble Berlin was founded in 1983 by
members of the Berliner Philharmoniker. From its very
first concert – featuring Schubert’s Octet – the ensemble
attracted critical acclaim. It takes its name from the
German architect, Hans Scharoun, associated with his
greatest creation, the Berlin Philharmonie, home of the
Berliner Philharmoniker. Setting new standards worldwide,
the hall contained space for making music in the
spirit of conveying tradition and innovation, increasing
communication and developing understanding. The
musicians continue to explore Scharoun’s legacy in their
artistic commitment to the rich heritage of music of the
past as well as meeting the challenges of the present and
preparing for the future. The ensemble uses the classic
octet instrumentation as its basis: clarinet, horn, bassoon,
two violins, viola, cello and double bass. Schubert’s
Octet, Beethoven’s Septet and masterpieces by Mozart
and Brahms form the core of its Classical-Romantic
repertoire. Programmes often include works with
additional members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, as
well as involving a range of international conductors and
soloists. In recent years, Scharoun Ensemble concerts
have been conducted by Claudio Abbado, Daniel
Barenboim and Simon Rattle amongst others. Alongside
Classical and Romantic repertoire, the Scharoun
Ensemble Berlin includes works for less usual
combinations of instruments. Contemporary music
(including many commissions) makes up a significant
part of the ensemble’s programming, including works by
Henze, Kurtág, Ligeti, Reimann, Stockhausen, Yun and,

of course, Adès. The ensemble undertakes frequent
concert tours and gives regular performances at major
international music festivals such as Berlin, Salzburg
Easter, Lucerne and Edinburgh and has established itself
as one of the most prominent chamber music ensembles
in Europe.
Alexander Bader clarinet
Markus Weidmann bassoon
Stefan de Leval Jezierski horn
Wolfram Brandl violin
Christoph Streuli violin
Micha Afkam viola
Richard Duven cello
Peter Riegelbauer double bass
About the performers
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concert. Due to the possibility of last minute changes, the online programme content may differ slightly from that of the final printed version. For details visit
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Programme edited by Edge-Wise, artwork by Jane Denton; printed by Vitesse London; advertising by Cabbell (tel. 020 8971 8450)
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