Thomas Ades

Thomas Ades at Alice Tully Hall

 

Photo:  Richard Termine 

Thomas Ades had no opera performance last night so instead he conducted a riotous concert at Alice Tully Hall which hypnotised the audience with his own mystical poem "All Shall Be Well", sliced through the Elgar cello concerto (Australian undergraduate cellist Rachel Siu) with the most precise conducting I've ever seen, and then played his "Three Studies of Couperin" which give voice to sounds which may be implied in the original scores and may or may not be inevitable. Some sounded like Couperin played on a mouth organ and some sounded like instrumental mistakes and all were fascinating. Then he expanded the orchestra into a scary monster, and belted out Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (written in a state of high anxiety in LA during the war). People screamed, then left in silence.