Thomas Adès: Piano Quintet; Schubert: "Trout" Quintet

CML call number: CD/CLASSICAL/Adès
Russell Platt wrote in the New Yorker: "As a fan once said, 'We always return to Schubert.' The music's tuneful appeal and its miraculous balance of Romantic melancholy and Classical discipline never wear thin. … [T]he Schubert of EMI's new album, featuring the pianist Thomas Adès and members of the Belcea Quartet, is a young composer still clamoring to be heard. The forms are dynamic and unpredictable, the fast movements go like the wind, and the intense Belcea string players, with their grainy tone colors, dig into every line for meaning. It's no surprise that Adès, one of the world's major modernist composers, gives the piano part a strikingly independent profile, but it's even more gratifying to hear him play his own Piano Quintet at the top of the album. In twenty minutes, Adès reinvents Classical sonata form, developing wistful melodies reminiscent of Schubert and Berg into a structure girded by the rhythmic complexity of Ferneyhough and the iron logic of Ligeti. The Arditti Quartet, fearless explorers of the new and strange, are with him all the way" ("Classical Notes: Gone Fishin'," 8/8-15/2006, p. 24).