Sound Clips: Champignon Cutting and Champignon Cutting Phase Shifted by Michael Peters

The first clip is close mic recording cutting champignon mushrooms for dinner. The second recording is phase shifted it using granular synthesis.

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What does Christian Thielemann think of the music of Gustav Mahler? The German conductor, possibly the most convincing Wagner interpreter of our day, was recently asked that question at a Munich press conference, and it was a charged query: for some years, Thielemann has been trailed by rumors of reactionary political sympathies, even of anti-Semitism, and his avoidance of Mahler has in some places been taken as evidence of his alleged views. (Jane Kramer reported on the Thielemann controversy in a New Yorker article in 2001.) Jens Laurson, of the ionarts blog, attended the press conference, and notes that Thielemann’s response to the Mahler question took a surprising twist. The conductor said: “Mahler’s music lends itself most to those conductors who know how to hold back, who are good at understatement. That doesn’t exactly accommodate my conducting style; I’ve not been terribly successful at that yet. The music of Mahler is already so full of effects, if you are tempted to add anything, you only make it worse. I admire those conductors who achieve that certain noblesse—which is what I desire to achieve, eventually. Not always to enhance something.” Laurson’s entire post is, as they say, worth reading.

Photo: Thielemann in a Bayreuth bookstore, 2004.

“Five stars out of five. Tevot (2007), written for the Berlin Philharmonic, is Adès’s largest orchestral work. It shows a Sibelian mastery of development and transition – even when the harmonic material is, like Sibelius, relatively conservative and the melodic content reminiscent of 20th century neo-romantics. Like a latter-day symphonist, Adès takes the listener on a vivid sonic journey, juxtaposing tensile motifs on woodwinds, strings and percussion with constantly moving, seductively textured blocks of sound.” — Financial Times [Andrew Clark]

EMI Classics presents the world-premiere release of three of Thomas Adès’s new works recorded live, partly conducted by the composer himself, and, in the case of Tevot, by Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic.

“Tevot” means “arks” in Hebrew but another meaning is “bars in a piece of music.” In an interview with The Guardian, Adès said: “I liked the idea that the bars of the music were carrying the notes as a sort of family through the piece. And they do, because without bars, you'd have musical chaos. But I was thinking about the ark, the vessel, in the piece as the earth. (…) It sounds a bit colossal, but it's the idea of the ship of the world." The work was commissioned by the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker and the Carnegie Hall Corporation; it was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle at the Philharmonie in Berlin in February 2007 and received its US premiere, also with the Berlin Philharmonic and Rattle, at Carnegie Hall in November 2007. Sir Simon Rattle considers Adès “perhaps the most extravagantly gifted (of young UK composers),” and he and the Berlin Philharmonic program Adès’s works frequently.

In September 2005 Adès’s Violin Concerto written for Anthony Marwood was premiered at the Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by the composer.

The album is rounded out with Adès’s Three Studies after Couperin (2006) and a three-movement suite (2007) from the opera Powder Her Face.

Since the release of Adès’s opera The Tempest on EMI Classics in June 2009, the recording has received attention on a global scale. In France, the disc was recently awarded the prestigious Diapason d’Or de l’année, and in the U.S. the album was a ‘Critic’s Choice’ pick in Opera News.