The trouble with Thomas Ades

(While I was waiting for my friend to arrive I sketched a few of the people arriving at the hall, some of which are dotted about this post.)

BCMG, Arditti Quartet, Pokrovsky Ensemble/Ades

LSO St. Luke's, 25 March

This concert was part of a wider retrospective of Thomas Ades' music (the accent you see on his name is an affectation that I'm not going to dignify by using). I can't help but wonder at the reasoning of structuring such an event around a still young composer whose output numbers barely 35 works. Surely there are other composers with a more substantial body of work that deserves the exposure?

Still, I do have a guarded liking for some of Ades' music, so it seemed interesting to go along to this concert and hear several pieces together.

The opening work, a song cycle Ades wrote at 18, was a disappointment. "Five Eliot Landscapes" sets poems of T.S. Eliot in a style that might be described as "generic non-scary modernist". If I had to imagine how a teenager would set Eliot (not hard to do, as I did it myself) this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect - self-consciously "high art", with a few striking ideas amongst a morass of dreary note-spinning. I've always thought one of the problems with setting poetry is that you come up with a brilliant idea for one or two lines, and then have the inconvenience of having to set the rest of the poem too, and this was how these songs came across. All perfectly well executed (although I found myself distracted by the frequent extreme hand-crossing in the piano part - played by the composer - which seemed to have no real reason behind it) but ultimately unmemorable.

The Chamber Symphony, composed shortly afterwards, is a completely different matter. Here is a work that stakes its territory with precocious confidence, a jazz-tinged undercurrent fuelling an exuberant and vital piece. it does flag after a while (Ades seems happier writing fast music) but picks up admirably before ending in a slyly off-hand manner.

Living Toys is cut from very similar cloth, although written 3 years later. Again there are many exuberant moments, although I couldn't help but feel that it lacked the freshness of the Chamber Symphony. There's a lot of music here that comes across as the sort of thing a young man might write having just heard Ligeti, especially in the prominent horn part that plays considerably on natural "out of tune" harmonics. There's also an ill-advised reference to "2001: a Space Odyssey", bound to fail because the harmonics and glissandi Ades presents, effective though they are in their own right, can never evoke the death of H.A.L. as well as the distorted singing of "Daisy Daisy" in the film.

"Arcadiana" was written a year later, and is a very self-conscious affair that uses quotations from and allusions to other composers to no great effect. There's a deconstruction of "Nimrod" from Elgar's Enigma Variations that has nothing to say about the Elgar and hence comes across as pretty but pointless. Occasionally striking ideas surface, but are never around long enough to make an impression. One gets the impression of a composer losing his nerve, and settling for writing acceptable "official" music rather than risk failure in the pursuit of something greater. I've been listening to the complete quartets of Elizabeth Maconchy, a composer whose astringent but approachable language might put her in the same category as Ades, but her works are altogether more substantial and hewn from tougher stuff than this rather limp affair.

(Why isn't there a major retrospective of Maconchy going on, in her centenary year? Her neglect is criminal, compared to the adulation that Ades routinely receives for a far lesser achievement.)

There's no doubt that Ades is a talented composer, but it's hard to see a coherent personality in his music. Maybe this will emerge in the coming years, but it feels too soon to be holding grandiose surveys of his work. Of course, the impetus behind this is, I suspect, more down to lazy programming and the influence of a certain coterie in classical music that Ades has slotted in with very effectively. He needs to take some risks, otherwise I fear he's doomed to be a composer of effective but uncompelling pastiche, polite music for polite people that upsets no-one and harms no-one. Music should never be harmless. There's nothing wrong with overt influences, of course, but I'm not convinced Ades owns his, in the way that Stravinsky does, who always sounds like no-one but himself, even when he's appropriating a style in as extreme a fashion as he does to Mozart in "The Rake's Progress".

Talking ofStravinsky, his "Les Noces" completed the concert. Stravinsky also borrowed from numerous styles liberally, but never sounds like anyone but himself. And how wonderful to hear the singing of the Pokrovsky Ensemble, whose raw, strident folk singing style energised this wonderful piece in a way that preened conservatoire voices never could.

There was another concert after this one, featuring works by Conlon Nancarrow, that I'd like to have stayed for, but I was disoriented enough by the clocks going forward without staying out til past midnight. Shame. Still, I can always dig out my CDs of his Studies for Player-piano.