Ades: Living Toys

This is the second recording of music by young British composer Thomas Adès, and it contains several quite impressive works, mostly written between 1993 and 1994. His seven-movement, 20-minute string quartet Arcadiana (Op. 12) stands as the most complete achievement on this disk, and it's a work of striking ingenuity and confidence. Adès was 27 when this recording was released, and more than anything it's a document of an imaginative artist finding his own voice. "The Origins of the Harp" is moving for its dramatic turns and a poignant sense of closure. "Gefriolsae Me," sung by men from the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, springs upward from a medieval motet. The title work is the most harmonically jagged and rhythmically free of these works and points to an ever-searching spirit. Among the musicians, the London Sinfonietta, the Endellion Quartet, and Adès himself perform with great precision and care, and the engineering is superb. --Pierre Ruhe