Mark Simpson is artist-in-focus at Kings Place for the current season and will feature as both clarinettist and composer in the 2021-22 series. For this season-opening concert, he appeared with the Quatuor Diotima as an instrumentalist to play the evening’s centrepiece, the premiere of a new clarinet quintet by Thomas Adès, co-commissioned for the occasion by Kings Place.
In four movements lasting 20 minutes, Alchymia is Adès’s most substantial chamber work since his string quartet The Four Quarters in 2010. Its starting point, and the origin of its title, is the world of alchemy in Elizabethan London, and each of the movements carries a suggestive title. The opening A Sea Change (referencing Shakespeare’s Tempest) is a luminous sequence of harmonies woven from the simplest shifting scale passages, before the clarinettist (who plays a basset clarinet) triggers a tumbling collapse into the lowest reaches of his instrument; the other three movements take existing music as a starting point.
The Woods So Wild, a whispering moto perpetuo, references William Byrd’s variations on a Tudor song; the quietly consoling Lachrymae echoes John Dowland’s famous lament, while the final movement, Divisions on a Lute Song takes playwright Frank Wedekind’s song, which Alban Berg famously used in the final act of his opera Lulu, and subjects it to another set of increasingly fantastical transformations. The clarinet writing throughout is truly virtuosic, the effect mesmerising; Alchymia seems to me one of Adès’s finest achievements of recent years.
The Diotima had begun the evening with an early quartet by Schubert, the D major, D74, an efficient performance that seemed to try just a bit too hard to be characterful. But when Simpson rejoined the group after the interval for Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, that performance took on a real sense of shape and flow, even if it sometimes pushed at the boundaries of what seemed appropriate expressively. Urged on by Simpson, the Adagio became an authentic tragic statement, its central climax a shriek of pain, which only enhanced the cathartic effect of the third movement, and the final set of variations.
