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In Seven Days
Thomas Adès music
Tal Rosner visuals

Nicolas Hodges piano
Thomas Adès conductor
London Sinfonietta

Piano Studies Nos. 6 & 7

Thomas Adès & Rolf Hind piano
Tal Rosner & Sophie Clements visuals

CD and DVD Set

The Times, December 2011
****

Want something different for Christmas? Have you considered construction scaffolding, the Festival Hall light fittings, a lift’s machinery and the surface of the Thames? These are among the mundane materials used by the British/Israeli film-maker Tal Rosner in the visual layer of In Seven Days, the ingenious, far from mundane “video-ballet” composed by Britain’s musical volcano Thomas Adès (he’s also Rosner’s civil partner). You can buy it now as a CD/DVD package from Signum Classics, the new CD home of the music’s crack performers, the London Sinfonietta.

Created to celebrate the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the refurbishment of our own Royal Festival Hall, this half-hour creation narrative seemed attractive but faintly underwhelming at its 2008 London premiere. Its force became diffused in the spaces between the Sinfonietta’s busy ensemble, the industrious commentary from Nicolas Hodges’s piano, and images divided across six screens. Happily that’s not the case on the DVD. Locked in at home, the force is concentrated. Now you revel as shape, rhythm and dynamics interact and seven sections take us from watery chaos (the Thames digitally enhanced) through the creation of land, vegetation and living things to a final day of contemplation.

Like alchemists, Adès and Rosner transform basic elements into a glittering wonder. Best-known in Britain for his title sequence to Channel 4’s series Skins, Rosner’s styling here often harks back to the abstract patterning of the 1920s European film avant-garde. But not in a spirit of dusty homage; all is exuberance as blobs dance, circles pulse and spindles multiply into an emerald jungle, in perfect time to the mounting waves of Adès’s score. An exciting creation about creation: that’s In Seven Days.

Adès himself conducts the Sinfonietta. He’s also featured along with Rolf Hind as an heroic pianist, navigating the complex rhythms of two Studies by Conlon Nancarrow, originally punched out on piano rolls for reproduction on player-pianos. No 6, gentle and slight, doesn’t quite suit the visual accompaniment, a fancy version of TV interference. But Rosner and Sophie Clements ballet of circles, triangles and squares only amplify the fun of the epic No 7, an intoxicating pyramid of clashing rhythms. Bold and delightful, this release would make an admirable gift for a discerning Christmas stocking.

Geoff Brown

www.steven-berryman.com

A fascinating new release from Signum Classics, and the second with the London Sinfonietta, is ‘In Seven Days’ by the British composer Thomas Adès (b. 1971), alongside arrangements by Adès of two Nancarrow studies for two pianos. ’In Seven Days’ is a work for piano and orchestra with moving image (created by Tal Rosner) and was jointly commissioned by the Southbank Centre and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed in 2008. It tells the story of creation but returns to the Hebrew version and it is certainly compelling to hear the composer and creator of the visuals Rosner discuss the work in conversation on the DVD, along with performances of the works with the visuals.

“Chaos-Light-Dark” lives up to its name; the incisive strings (showing the skill of the London Sinfonietta players, here conducted by Adès) seem to be playing with an idea literally on the cellular level – it is something that needs to be seen with visuals and one can witness how beautifully the music captures the inherent energy in the visual and somehow the visual seems to absorb the rhythmic flow of the music. The entry of the piano (‘Light’) is effortlessly voiced and controlled by Nicolas Hodges – and the recording balances the piano well with the ensemble and deservedly makes him prominent. “Separation of the waters into sea and sky” felt very much like the music was undergoing a similar process of separation as wind/brass gestures feel they are being pulled from the piano. There is real precision in the integration of the visuals (all created by Rosner from photography and film footage from the two commissioning venues) and music not only in the motivic processes but the harmonic material, textural changes and orchestration all captured by a visual gesture.

One heard the opening of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand – not a quotation but the similarly dark orchestration – in “Land – Grass – Trees”. Real sense of growth in the music and images with ascending musical figures, and harmonic materials that shifted immediately just as one felt they might settle. “Stars – Sun – Moon” has such vibrancy with the flute/piccolo with unexpected twists in turns in the piano at a high tessitura. This is colourful orchestration showing virtuosity not only in structuring the synergy between music and visual but the colours of the orchestra and images. I hear Britten’s sea music in “Creatures of the Sea and Sky” yet this remains something quintessentially Adès: leaping figures capture the energy of a world awakening with creatures and musical materials from this movement appear in the next movement “Creatures of the Land”. This penultimate movement shows how the piano behaves very much like a narrator, observer and commentator of the act of creation and as such it comments on previously heard musical material. Nicolas Hodges displays incredible breadth in his dynamic range and ability to capture the colours inherent in Adès’ writing. “Contemplation” is utterly contemplative with the delicate harmonics in the strings and slow descending music in the piano. The ending is sensitively conceived, if it really an ending as Adès rightly says on the DVD the end of ‘In Seven Days’ is the beginning.

Two studies by Nancarrow complete this recording – Adès arranged Study No. 6 and No. 7 for two pianos and performs them with Rolf Hind. A different kind of process here as ‘In Seven Days’ was conceived as a work for music and visuals from the outset while here Tal Rosner, with Sophie Clements, created moving images that connect with the musical rhetoric of Nancarrow’s studies with insight and inventiveness. The playing is precise, witty and displays real insight into the complexity and rhythmic interest of Nancarrow’s works, as much as the visuals do. This is a insightful recording and is presented extremely well as a CD and DVD set – Nancarrow and Adès connecting well on the same recording. There is something balletic in the synergy of music and image here; very much worth hearing and seeing.

Steven Berryman

The Telegraph, January 2012
***

Adès’s piano concerto In Seven Days is inspired by the biblical story of creation. At its premiere the visuals by video artist Tal Rosner made the whole seem frenetically overactive. Without them, it seems much the same. The ingenuity and dazzling colours of Adès’s wheeling rhythmic and harmonic cycles are jaw-dropping, as is the performers’ virtuosity.

Ivan Hewett

The Financial Times, February 2012

The significance of this release is twofold. First, England’s leading classical composer has become a casualty of EMI’s financial problems: the once-great British label has been sold to Universal, forcing Adès to go to independent. Second, his recording of In seven Days, a 30-minute piano concerto with moving image, comes not only on DVD but also on CD – a tacit acknowledgment that Tal Rosner’s pretentious video, supposedly on a Creation theme, adds nothing to the work’s substance. So dump the generic DVD and just listen to the music, the most accessible Adès has written in more than 20 years as a published composer. It continues his preoccupation with symphonic metamorphosis, dancing over various romantic idioms in an ultra-tonal pastiche that, however retro on the surface, is unmistakably Adès in its seamlessness, intricacy and ecstatic momentum. Behind the piano’s Brahmsian scales and balletic figurations lies a phantasmagorical tapestry of spangled sound and sophisticated colour, welded and melded into shapes and rhythms of dazzling malleability. As at the 2008 premiere, Nicolas Hodges is the agile soloist – but once again it’s the London Sinfonietta which steals the limelight under the composer’s baton. The filler is an Adès arrangement for two pianos (himself and Rolf Hind) of a pair of studies by cult American composer Conlon Nancarrow – an Adès indulgence that helps to explain his own fascination with harmonic and rhythmic cycles.

Andrew Clark

The Daily Telegraph, January 2012

Adès’ piano concerto In Seven Days is inspired by the biblical story of creation. At its premiere the visuals by video artist Tal Rosner made the whole seem frenetically overactive. Without them, it seems much the same. The ingenuity and dazzling colours of Adès’ wheeling rhythmic and harmonic cycles are jaw-dropping, as is the performers’ virtuosity.

Ivan Hewett

Time Out, January 2012
****

In 2008 Thomas Adès wrote a piano concerto that follows the Creation story (hence seven days movements, the last entitled ‘Contemplation’, the day of rest) and intended it to be performed integrally with Tal Rosner’s moving images. Adès generates musical ideas, develops and jostles them, sucking the listener into a living narrative: ‘Separation of Waters into Sea and Sky’; ‘Land-Grass-trees’; ‘Stars-Sun-Moon’; ‘Creatures…’ The music leaps off the page into the consciousness in this terrific performance. As for the images, they’re on the DVD where the music is played again and Adès and Rosner talk. There are also visuals for two of Conlon Nancarrow’s ‘studies’ for player piano, rhythmically intricate pieces transcribed for two (normal) pianos by Adès. Nancarrow (1912-97) had a wry sense of musical humour, teasing and beguiling n these examples.

Colin Anderson