Ades: Piano Quintet / Schubert:

The combination of the most famous of all piano quintets, Schubert's 1819 “Trout” Quintet and Thomas Adès's Piano Quintet, composed in 2001, seems to be a contrast between classical convention and modernist disembodiment, between the familiar and the newly imagined. But the juxtaposition between these two pieces tells another story, in which Schubert's familiar music is rendered strange by Adès's piece, and Schubert's piece in turn releases the connections between Adès's piece and the classical tradition.

The themes of the Quintet are recognizably tonal, and are closely related to one another in their melodic contours. But these simple building blocks are the starting points for rich and intricate processes of transformation. The long exposition is full of subtle metrical juxtapositions, with the piano and string quartet often playing in different time signatures simultaneously. Yet this is not simply a pitting of various pulses against one another. Where Adès's previous works have suspended musical styles and created different levels of allusions and reference, the Piano Quintet extends that principle of reimagination to its entire structure
Thomas Adès: Piano Quintet | Franz Schubert: “Trout” Quintet
EMI Classics 57664-2
Released 2005

Thomas Adès
1. Piano Quintet
2. Piano Quintet
3. Piano Quintet
Arditti String Quartet
with Thomas Adès, Piano

Franz Schubert
4. I: Allegro Vivace
5. II: Andante
6. III: Scherzo (Presto)
7. Thema: (Andantino)
8. Variation I
9. Variation II
10. Variation III
11. Variation IV
12. Variation V
13. Allegretto
14. V: Finale (Allegro Giust)
Thomas Ades, Piano
Corin Long, Double Bass
Corina Belcea, Violin
Krzysztof Chorzelski, Viola
Alasdair Tait, Cello


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