Arcadiana

No matter how many large, complex, multi-disciplinary projects we produce, there's something extremely special about touring a show like Arcadiana. No microphones, no effects – just six musicians on a stage making incredible music. It feels very intimate, and very honest.

The Brahms sextet we're playing in the second half has been a favourite of mine since I was a student. It's the sort of piece that eager young musicians play through with their friends late at night, usually after a few glasses of wine. It's a swashbuckling, seductive and utterly gorgeous piece, bursting with tunes, full of great moments for each of the performers to show off with.

It's also a brilliant counterpoint to our titular work by Thomas Adès – thorny, elusive, crystalline and beautiful – not to mention Jörg Widmann's mad, bad and dangerous to know '180 Beats Per Minute'. All in all it's a hugely varied three course meal, but we think it's a knockout, and I suspect you will too.

ADAM SZABO

‘180 Beats Per Minute’ is probably a couple of clicks faster than the techno nights of Jörg Widmann’s school years that inspired him to write this piece. But Widmann’s soundworld is less grotty, student club, and more like being inside a big, old-fashioned stock exchange, where everyone is shouting their own slight variation on an urgent theme. Imagine yourself screaming “Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell!” down multiple phones to multiple important clients, and you get a sense of what it’s like to exist in the middle of Widmann’s score.

But despite the title, what makes ‘180 Beats Per Minute’ feel fast is not its tempo. Instead, the frenzied feeling comes from its disorientating rhythms, twisting and turning like a crazed rollercoaster that never settles before lurching to its next destination. Two minutes in, a new idea begins: a breakdown, or the beginning of a demented fugue, or both. It snowballs with added voices and colours, and cries out for joy as it reaches terminal velocity. Even in its thinner sections, there’s a maniacal intensity to Widmann’s piece that makes it impossible not to get engrossed in.

HUGH MORRIS

The first time I properly listened to Thomas Adès was on a CD of his breakthrough orchestral work ‘Asyla’ I picked up for £1 in a charity shop. For reasons unknown, the CD stayed in my heavy, ageing laptop’s disc drive for years, so on every boring WiFi-less train journey, Adès’ music went with me. I had a mind to leave the disc in there when last month, I finally donated that huge beast of a thing to charity, so someone else might accidentally discover his fantastically interesting music.

Those train journeys helped forge a real love of 90s Adès: ‘Asyla’, caustic, brittle (and also partly inspired by techno); ‘Powder Her Face’, the surprisingly lewd chamber opera on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll; and ‘Arcadiana’, his first string quartet, which reveals the strong compositional voice of someone in full knowledge of his history, and yet determined to construct an inimitable musical language all of his own.

‘Arcadiana’ is comprised of seven short movements that, according to the composer, all evoke various vanished or vanishing ‘idylls’. There are lands we might recognise: Mozart’s night music inspires the second movement, complete with a couple of ethereal references to the famous ‘Queen of the Night’ aria; the sixth, ‘O Albion’, is tender and very English. Adès describes the opening movement as like “the ballad of a lugubrious Venetian gondola”, and the rest seem similarly watery – floating, half-submerged, or on a deep dive.

What Adès gets at is not just arcadia (and its associations with pastoral beauty), but arcadiana, the practice of remembering those idyllic landscapes, like antique collectors who are into Victoriana, or Edwardiana. Because of that, I hear a little bit of distance to the piece, each comedic touch and magic moment questioning the sincerity of the whole. But in its best moments, the composer flits between ancient and modern without noticing, and ‘Arcadiana’ ravishingly amalgamates both.

HUGH MORRIS

I. Venezia notturna
II. Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön
III. Auf dem Wasser zu singen
IV. Et... (tango mortale)
V. L'Embarquement
VI. O Albion
VII. Lethe

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross describes Brahms as “the great poet of the ambiguous, in-between, nameless emotions. Ambient unease, pervasive wistfulness, bemused resignation, contained rage, ironic merriment, smiling through tears.” The String Sextet contains a bit of all of that, turbo-charged by intense feelings about love, regret, and the place of art.

In 1858, Brahms travelled with Clara Schumann for a holiday in Detmold. There, he fell head over heels in love with Agathe von Siebold. It didn’t last, as Brahms broke off the subsequent engagement in what Tom Service calls “a feat of self-aggrandising, self-pitying behaviour” that put Brahms’ belief in his own art above all else: “For a woman may love an artist, but she cannot have the perfect certainty of victory which is in his heart,” he wrote. Classic Brahms.

HUGH MORRIS