Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born in London on March 1, 1971, and lives there and in Los Angeles, California. His Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, was commissioned by the Berlin Festival and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Written in 2005 for violinist Anthony Marwood, it was premiered by Marwood with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe led by the composer during the Berlin Festival on September 4, 2005, in Berlin’s Kammermusiksaal. Marwood was soloist and Adès conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the American premiere, which took place on February 10, 2006, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
In addition to the solo violin, the score of the Violin Concerto calls for an orchestra of 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (2 players: cowbell, small can or metal tin, metal block or large anvil, suspended cymbal, clash cymbals, 4 tam-tams of varied sizes, metal guero, wood guero, low wood block, small bongo, side drum, several low drums, large bass drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
As with the symphony genre, Thomas Adès has had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the idea of “concerto,” although he has written several. When he composed his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra for Kirill Gerstein, he said that he wanted to write “a proper concerto,” which he certainly delivered, writing a piece in the traditional three movements featuring, for the most part, a traditional approach to the soloist/orchestra combination. His caveat, “proper concerto,” implies that his previous concertos lay somewhat outside of that tradition. His first concerto for piano, In Seven Days, is also a symphonic poem based on the Genesis narrative of the creation of the universe.
The present Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, although a three-movement work, is a kind of triptych with most of its weight in its middle movement. This is in contrast to the familiar violin concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Prokofiev, et al, in which the emotional and narrative weight lies in a substantial first movement. The middle movement, “Paths,” in Adès’s concerto is by far the longest of the three. This formal idea is comparable in painting to an altarpiece triptych, with two lesser panels flanking the main scene. The first movement is about four minutes long, the third less than six; the central movement is nearly eleven.
The title Concentric Paths refers to one of Adès’s formal preoccupations in his music. The concept can seem fairly abstract in music. “Cyclic” musical materials can mean a lot of different things. One basic premise is that of repetition and recurrence of a musical idea, which can apply to structures as small as motifs of a few pitches(e.g., a note sequence of a-b-c-d transformed through the patterns b-c-d-a, c-d-a-b, d-a-b-c, etc.), or as large as groups of measures or even of big episodes made up of cycles of keys. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a different kind of cyclic form, a famous example of piece in which a four-note motif is the building block for all four of its movements. Cyclic works include those based on repeated chord progressions, such as the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the Chaconne movement of Bach’s D minor Partita for solo violin, and the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The rondo form in music, frequently encountered in the finales of concertos by Mozart and other Classical-era composers, is another type of cyclic form. It has its corollary in the poetic structure of the same name. Composers (including Adès) often rely on the “spiral” metaphor as well, particularly with reference to harmonic cycles that repeat in different keys in rising or falling progression.
Adès’s use of cyclic ideas and harmonic progressions is an identifying marker of his style present audibly in the Dante ballet, his string quartet Wreath, Asyla, the opera The Tempest, and in the symphony-like, single-movement Tevot. In the Violin Concerto, Adès uses harmonic and melodic chains of different lengths as a foundation for the violin solo’s constantly changing colors and textures. Some of the violin’s short, repeating figures can be thought of as circular, as can larger-scale ideas. The fast first movement, “Rings,” begins with a sixteenth-note figure in the violin supported by downward-trending harmonic motion in the orchestra. Presented by orchestral sections at different speeds, these harmonies begin to overlap and blur. As the movement progresses, the soloist’s music becomes more sustained, often residing in the stratosphere of the violin’s range. To close the movement, the harmonic direction is briefly reversed, now moving up, and the solo violin returns to fast figures.
The middle movement opens with a series of aggressive quadruple-stop chords (all four strings played at nearly the same time) in the solo part over chromatic descending chords in the trumpets and trombone. The effect, which obtains throughout the movement, suggests a fractured Baroque passacaglia: a quasi-repeating series of harmonies, reinvented each time through instrument and texture changes, over which the violin solo spins virtuosic and expressively wide-ranging variations. The orchestra bottoms out, registrally speaking, about a third of the way through the movement via double basses, low drums, and low winds. In a long, building passage that makes up the last third of the movement, the violin “floats” over the sustained textures of the orchestra, its rhythm specific but out of phase with the ensemble.
The finale, “Rounds,” is lighter in mood than the somehow mournful “Paths.” Although “Rounds” similarly features cycling chord progressions and variations over a ground, the definite, folk-like tune shared between soloist and orchestra becomes fodder for imitative interplay. Hinted at and felt throughout the piece, a continually shifting tonal center comes to a full stop at the final fortissimo unison F.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
The American premiere of the Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, was given by soloist Anthony Marwood with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the composer’s direction on February 10, 2006, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A.
The first BSO performances of the Violin Concerto were Anthony Marwood’s on March 25-26, 2011, with Adès conducting.