Thomas Adès: The Exterminating Angel Symphony / Violin Concerto
Pentatone

It's fitting that the performances by Thomas Søndergård and the Minnesota Orchestra of material by Thomas Adès (b. 1971) should be so electrifying when the composer himself has been a similarly electrifying presence since bursting onto the scene decades ago. Adès' audacious sensibility and singularity of voice were in place from the outset, the preternatural maturity of his first opera, the smash Powder Her Face (1995), an early illustration of his gifts. How wonderful it is, then, to be presented with two splendid samplings of his work, Violin Concerto (2005), now a staple of the contemporary repertoire, and The Exterminating Angel Symphony (2020), the work drawn from the composer's 2016 operatic treatment of Luis Buñuel's cult 1962 film. Enhancing the recording's impact is its length, with a forty-minute running time refreshing for being so concise. Speaking of electricity, the album was recorded live and as such benefits from the extra charge of excitement that was present in the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall in September 2024.

It's an album of firsts in a couple of respects, with the symphony receiving its world premiere recording and the recording marking Søndergård's debut album with the ensemble. The latter was the first professional orchestra to perform Adès' work in the United States, which makes the release for him all the more special. Enhancing one's appreciation for the recording are illuminating liner notes by Nicholas Landrum. His description of Adès as a composer who perfectly couples the visceral and the intellectual is on-point, as is his observation that his music “is steeped in tradition yet also plunges into the modernist depths of timbre, rhythmic complexity, and surrealist texture.”

It's also natural that a composer so daring would gravitate to a film director whose work is as wildly imaginative and provocative as Buñuel's (no one ever forgets seeing the first time the eye-slitting scene in Un Chien Andalou, the Mexican director's 1929 collaboration with Salvador Dali). The absurdist comedy The Exterminating Angel is prototypical Buñuel for featuring a dinner party at a mansion from which the guests are inexplicably incapable of leaving, and in basing his third opera on the film Adès created something as wild and grotesque. Vocals are, of course, absent in the four-movement symphonic treatment, but the orchestral effects and gestures are transfixing on their own terms. Opening with bombastic convulsions to satirically comment on the guests, “Entrances” jerks drunkenly back and forth, the jerky flow reflecting Adès' deployment of “irrational meters,” before settling into less destabilizing episodes of strings-heavy languor. Romantic expressions by concertmaster Erin Keefe are highlighted as the music slows to a crawl. Simultaneously macabre and menacing, “March” enters powerfully with Shostakovian snare drum rudiments driving the action and urgent bluster from the strings and horns, the agitation mirroring bewildered party-goers confronting the dilemma they're facing. The tension gripping the second movement gives way to relative calm in the “Berceuse” third, which exudes a rather Berg-like tone in its subtly dissonant fatalism. A hint of Copland-ish tenderness emerges, but the mood is predominantly doom-laden. The closing movement, “Waltzes,” feels particularly emblematic of a Buñuel-ian sensibility in its skewed take on the dance form, and one could be forgiven for thinking of Richard Strauss and, again, Berg in the music's gruesome re-imaginings of the waltz. As the work inches towards it close, plunging string glissandi present one final arresting gesture in a work filled with many. Never formulaic, Adès' music is always unpredictable but never incoherent.

Described by Landrum as “devilishly difficult,” Violin Concerto is structured in three movements (fast–slow–fast) and in its oft-vertiginous swirl makes good on its original subtitle, “Concentric Paths.” Having delivered in the vicinity of sixty performances of the piece over a twenty-year period before the recording, violinist Leila Josefowicz delivers a scintillating performance that sets an intimidatingly high bar for others to equal. Like much of Adès' work, the concerto comfortably straddles traditions in sounding both historically grounded and brazenly new. After beginning with harmonics and violin arpeggios in the aptly titled “Rings,” the music grows increasingly destabilizing and ethereal where the violin soars high over the orchestra. Adding to the considerable challenges posed by the work, the violinist is tasked with playing continuously throughout a movement that is mercifully, for the soloist, but four minutes long. Twice its length is the central “Paths,” which opens with the violinist and brass section combatively trading off before all involved ease into a slower, lyrical passage. Turmoil eventually sets in, however, as the music grows ever more tumultuous, searing, and frenzied. Reminiscent of Berg's own violin concerto, an almost Bach-like gesture briefly surfaces until the material plunges again into a state of anguish. Closing out the work is “Rounds,” where a ritualistic dance pulse injects the material with a boost of energy. Ascending to a high register, Josefowicz again soars brilliantly until she's sucked into the orchestral maelstrom. Her contention that the piece is “one of the most exciting pieces in the violin repertoire” is strongly upheld by the work.

November 2025