The list of composers who have written concertos for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is a long and varied one, from André Previn and John Williams to Wolfgang Rihm and Unsuk Chin. The latest name to be added to that distinguished list is Thomas Adès; Mutter gave the premiere of his Air at last year’s Lucerne festival, and she was also the soloist in its UK premiere, with the composer himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.
Composed during lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Air carries the subtitle Homage to Sibelius, and certainly there is an echo of the modal opening of that composer’s Sixth Symphony in the way that it begins, not in obvious thematic terms, as much as in the sense of tranquil reflection that the works share, as Adès’s soloist weaves a gossamer thread of sound through the orchestra’s stepwise descending lines, which gradually build, layer on layer, colour on colour, until the full ensemble is involved.
The cumulative effect of what is essentially a giant canon, which resolves itself only in the closing moments of the 16-minute movement, is raptly intense. The economy and transcendent beauty of music that never raises its voice is totally beguiling, and the way in which so much is woven out of such basic material recalls early Arvo Pärt. Mutter’s beautifully supple, silvery sound never lost its poise either. Earlier she had played another piece composed for her, Witold Lutosławski’s Partita, which the composer arranged for orchestra from an earlier version for violin and piano, and which sets out in a well-mannered, almost courtly way before twisting into much darker, more troubling territory.
Stravinsky’s last two ballet scores supplied the concert’s frame. Where 1947’s Orpheus was one of the last major products of his neoclassical years, and relies on the gestural world of the symphonies he had composed earlier in the decade, Agon, completed 10 years later, was one of his first serial scores. Both were played with crispness and laconic vividness by the LSO, and Adès ensured that the most striking aspects of both works – the final funereal processional of Orpheus, the ghosts of baroque dances that flit through Agon – seemed so fresh yet so utterly Stravinskyan.
