Tevot

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born in London, England, and lives there and in Los Angeles, California. He wrote Tevot in 2006 on a commission from the Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Simon Rattle led the Berlin Philharmonic in the world premiere in Berlin on February 21, 2007; Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic gave the American premiere at Carnegie Hall, New York City, on November 14, 2007. The BSO’s November 16-18, 2023, performances of the piece under Thomas Adès are the orchestra's first.

The score for Tevot calls for 5 flutes (3rd-5th doubling piccolo; 3rd doubling bass flute), 5 oboes (4th doubling English horn; 5th doubling bass oboe); 5 B-flat clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet; 4th doubling E-flat and A clarinets and optional basset clarinet; 5th doubling contrabass clarinet); 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 5 trumpets (1st doubling piccolo trumpet ad lib.), 3 trombones, tuba, 2 timpani players (with rototom), percussion (6 players, playing variously glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, crotales, tuned anvils, tuned cans or pans, 4 large handbells, tubular bells or bell plates, 7 gongs and optional large gong, cymbals, tam-tam, side drum, tenor drum, log drum, bass drum), harp, piano and celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos and double basses). Duration is about 22 minutes.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is fortunate to have a strong ongoing relationship with the composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès. He served as the BSO’s Artistic Partner for several years, in which capacity he conducted the BSO and the Tanglewood Music Center orchestras, curated Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, and performed as pianist in recital and with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. He has led most of his major orchestral works with the BSO, including the world premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Kirill Gerstein; the recording was nominated for three Grammy Awards. In the 2022-23 season Adès conducted the BSO in his Inferno Suite and Paradiso from his evening-length ballet score Dante and the BSO, with Andris Nelsons conducting, gave the American premiere of the composer’s BSO co-commissioned Air for violin and orchestra with Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom it Adès wrote the piece. On November 19, 2023, he performs as pianist in his Növények (“Plants”), seven Hungarian poems for mezzo-soprano and piano sextet, which receives its American premiere in a concert with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and mezzo-soprano Katalin Karólyi at Jordan Hall, Boston.

Adès calls his Air an “homage to Jean Sibelius,” indicating the Finnish composer’s deep impact on his own music. As much as he is a fully contemporary artist, Adès has a fascination with history and culture—not just music history, not just musical culture—that broadens and enriches each of his work. Related to this, he has been led increasingly to put his stamp on the major compositional genres. Ballet and opera, naturally, have built-in potential for expansive interaction with non-musical subject matter—just think of all that has been said or written of Dante’s Commedia or about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Adès used as the basis for an opera. Adès isn’t just interested in the culture of the far distant past: his opera The Exterminating Angel translates Luis Buñuel’s classic surrealist film, and recently Adès also scored Colette, a biographical drama about the French writer.

Adès has also thought long and profoundly about the more abstract, although still culturally laden, instrument genres such as “string quartet,” “symphony,” and “concerto.” His In Seven Days for piano and orchestra is a programmatic work, doubling as both a concerto and a symphonic poem in the Liszt tradition, its narrative a gloss on the creation myth from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. For his 2019 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, the abstract choice of title was deliberate in marking the piece as what he deemed “a proper concerto.” His Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths (2006), comes equipped with a subtitle suggesting some of its musical characteristics. It’s nonetheless called a concerto, and its three-movement form adheres, to a point, to the genre’s traditional expectations.

Although this wouldn’t be obvious from glancing at a list of his works, Adès has written four symphonies. His first, Asyla (which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award), adheres most closely to the genre’s traditional outward form: it’s in four movements; the second movement is a slow movement, the third movement a kind of scherzo/dance movement (although based not on the minuet or Ländler but rather on techno music). The most recent is his Exterminating Angel Symphony, recasting the opera’s music as a symphonic work. The composer also refers to the single-movement orchestra works Polaris and Tevot as symphonies, and here—as discussed by Richard Powell in an essay about Tevot—is where Sibelius comes back into the picture.

Adès affinity with Sibelius lies in the Finnish composer’s approach to large-scale form, particularly in the ways Sibelius creates variety through constant organic flow and transformation. In his increasingly innovative approach to the idea of “symphony,” ideas barely identifiable as “theme” or “motive” are the basis for dramatically varied movements and sections. In his Fifth Symphony, Sibelius revised what was initially a four-movement piece to meld its first and second movements together; in the Sixth, movement breaks seem almost pro forma; the Seventh, Sibelius’s last word on the subject, is a single, twenty-minute movement. Sibelius went back and forth on whether even to call the piece a symphony, but ultimately took a stand in favor of the name.

Adès spoke of his perspective on his own music in relation to Sibelius in his conversations with the journalist Tom Service, collected in the book Thomas Adès: Full of Noises:

I’m aware that, increasingly, my thinking is centrifugal—when you think from a point and everything is spun outwards—rather than centripetal. I recognize this, too, in some symphonists I really like…. In a symphony you’re supposed to create something that closes a circle. Sibelius symphonies are fascinating because I think they come from a conflict between the symphonic impulse to bring things round full circle, and an inner desire to go off into an endless horizon of trees or lakes or pure song or whatever it is—the undiscovered country.

“With Sibelius,” he goes on, “the function of symphonic completeness passed from the ‘abstract’ into the ‘metaphorical,’ and I think it has stayed there.” That Adès, excepting The Exterminating Angel Symphony, sidesteps calling his symphonies “Symphony” gives him leave, in a sense, to work and think in that realm metaphorically. Adès called Polaris, composed in 2010, a “Voyage for Orchestra,” suggesting that it’s the undiscovered country, after all, toward which the work traveled, albeit with a guiding star. The title of the earlier, larger Tevot also has journeying implications. As the composer explains, “‘Tevot’ (tey-VOT) means ‘Vessels.’ In modern Hebrew, the word is used for bars of music. Also, in the Bible, (tey-VA) is the word for the Ark of Noah and the cradle in which the baby Moses is carried on the river.”

Adès’s centrifugalness—his music’s tendency to spin out from a central point—is audible in many of his pieces, notably in his Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths; also in the upward-spiraling, heaven-journeying music of Paradiso from the ballet Dante. Tevot, sonically, spirals downward; through its many moods and states, the idea of a swirling descent persists. As in a passacaglia (a musical form based on a repeating harmonic progression or bass line), change, often radical change, takes place within the work’s (metaphorically, perhaps) stable architecture. The piece begins warmly, its continual fall lit by wheeling high woodwinds and strings and supported by lower brass, three layers of music proceeding at different rates. Throughout the piece a folding and relayering process takes place, instrumental groups exchanging background for foreground; sustained music gives way to quicksilver character, lightness to aggression, clarity to density, all working within the spiraling, circling motion. All the resources and colors of a massive orchestral edifice are brought to bear in this music, sometimes deployed sparingly, sometimes in great, powerful blocks, leaving one with an undeniable impression of Tevot’s overwhelmingly symphonic nature.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

Tevot, for large orchestra, Opus 24

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born in London, England, and lives there and in Los Angeles, California. He wrote Tevot in 2006 on a commission from the Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Simon Rattle led the Berlin Philharmonic in the world premiere in Berlin on February 21, 2007; Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic gave the American premiere at Carnegie Hall, New York City, on November 14, 2007. The BSO’s November 16-18, 2023, performances of the piece under Thomas Adès are the orchestra's first.

The score for Tevot calls for 5 flutes (3rd-5th doubling piccolo; 3rd doubling bass flute), 5 oboes (4th doubling English horn; 5th doubling bass oboe); 5 B-flat clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet; 4th doubling E-flat and A clarinets and optional basset clarinet; 5th doubling contrabass clarinet); 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 5 trumpets (1st doubling piccolo trumpet ad lib.), 3 trombones, tuba, 2 timpani players (with rototom), percussion (6 players, playing variously glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, crotales, tuned anvils, tuned cans or pans, 4 large handbells, tubular bells or bell plates, 7 gongs and optional large gong, cymbals, tam-tam, side drum, tenor drum, log drum, bass drum), harp, piano and celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos and double basses). Duration is about 22 minutes.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is fortunate to have a strong ongoing relationship with the composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès. He served as the BSO’s Artistic Partner for several years, in which capacity he conducted the BSO and the Tanglewood Music Center orchestras, curated Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, and performed as pianist in recital and with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. He has led most of his major orchestral works with the BSO, including the world premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Kirill Gerstein; the recording was nominated for three Grammy Awards. In the 2022-23 season Adès conducted the BSO in his Inferno Suite and Paradiso from his evening-length ballet score Dante and the BSO, with Andris Nelsons conducting, gave the American premiere of the composer’s BSO co-commissioned Air for violin and orchestra with Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom it Adès wrote the piece. On November 19, 2023, he performs as pianist in his Növények (“Plants”), seven Hungarian poems for mezzo-soprano and piano sextet, which receives its American premiere in a concert with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and mezzo-soprano Katalin Karólyi at Jordan Hall, Boston.

Adès calls his Air an “homage to Jean Sibelius,” indicating the Finnish composer’s deep impact on his own music. As much as he is a fully contemporary artist, Adès has a fascination with history and culture—not just music history, not just musical culture—that broadens and enriches each of his work. Related to this, he has been led increasingly to put his stamp on the major compositional genres. Ballet and opera, naturally, have built-in potential for expansive interaction with non-musical subject matter—just think of all that has been said or written of Dante’s Commedia or about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Adès used as the basis for an opera. Adès isn’t just interested in the culture of the far distant past: his opera The Exterminating Angel translates Luis Buñuel’s classic surrealist film, and recently Adès also scored Colette, a biographical drama about the French writer.

Adès has also thought long and profoundly about the more abstract, although still culturally laden, instrument genres such as “string quartet,” “symphony,” and “concerto.” His In Seven Days for piano and orchestra is a programmatic work, doubling as both a concerto and a symphonic poem in the Liszt tradition, its narrative a gloss on the creation myth from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. For his 2019 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, the abstract choice of title was deliberate in marking the piece as what he deemed “a proper concerto.” His Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths (2006), comes equipped with a subtitle suggesting some of its musical characteristics. It’s nonetheless called a concerto, and its three-movement form adheres, to a point, to the genre’s traditional expectations.

Although this wouldn’t be obvious from glancing at a list of his works, Adès has written four symphonies. His first, Asyla (which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award), adheres most closely to the genre’s traditional outward form: it’s in four movements; the second movement is a slow movement, the third movement a kind of scherzo/dance movement (although based not on the minuet or Ländler but rather on techno music). The most recent is his Exterminating Angel Symphony, recasting the opera’s music as a symphonic work. The composer also refers to the single-movement orchestra works Polaris and Tevot as symphonies, and here—as discussed by Richard Powell in an essay about Tevot—is where Sibelius comes back into the picture.

Adès affinity with Sibelius lies in the Finnish composer’s approach to large-scale form, particularly in the ways Sibelius creates variety through constant organic flow and transformation. In his increasingly innovative approach to the idea of “symphony,” ideas barely identifiable as “theme” or “motive” are the basis for dramatically varied movements and sections. In his Fifth Symphony, Sibelius revised what was initially a four-movement piece to meld its first and second movements together; in the Sixth, movement breaks seem almost pro forma; the Seventh, Sibelius’s last word on the subject, is a single, twenty-minute movement. Sibelius went back and forth on whether even to call the piece a symphony, but ultimately took a stand in favor of the name.

Adès spoke of his perspective on his own music in relation to Sibelius in his conversations with the journalist Tom Service, collected in the book Thomas Adès: Full of Noises:

I’m aware that, increasingly, my thinking is centrifugal—when you think from a point and everything is spun outwards—rather than centripetal. I recognize this, too, in some symphonists I really like…. In a symphony you’re supposed to create something that closes a circle. Sibelius symphonies are fascinating because I think they come from a conflict between the symphonic impulse to bring things round full circle, and an inner desire to go off into an endless horizon of trees or lakes or pure song or whatever it is—the undiscovered country.

“With Sibelius,” he goes on, “the function of symphonic completeness passed from the ‘abstract’ into the ‘metaphorical,’ and I think it has stayed there.” That Adès, excepting The Exterminating Angel Symphony, sidesteps calling his symphonies “Symphony” gives him leave, in a sense, to work and think in that realm metaphorically. Adès called Polaris, composed in 2010, a “Voyage for Orchestra,” suggesting that it’s the undiscovered country, after all, toward which the work traveled, albeit with a guiding star. The title of the earlier, larger Tevot also has journeying implications. As the composer explains, “‘Tevot’ (tey-VOT) means ‘Vessels.’ In modern Hebrew, the word is used for bars of music. Also, in the Bible, (tey-VA) is the word for the Ark of Noah and the cradle in which the baby Moses is carried on the river.”

Adès’s centrifugalness—his music’s tendency to spin out from a central point—is audible in many of his pieces, notably in his Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths; also in the upward-spiraling, heaven-journeying music of Paradiso from the ballet Dante. Tevot, sonically, spirals downward; through its many moods and states, the idea of a swirling descent persists. As in a passacaglia (a musical form based on a repeating harmonic progression or bass line), change, often radical change, takes place within the work’s (metaphorically, perhaps) stable architecture. The piece begins warmly, its continual fall lit by wheeling high woodwinds and strings and supported by lower brass, three layers of music proceeding at different rates. Throughout the piece a folding and relayering process takes place, instrumental groups exchanging background for foreground; sustained music gives way to quicksilver character, lightness to aggression, clarity to density, all working within the spiraling, circling motion. All the resources and colors of a massive orchestral edifice are brought to bear in this music, sometimes deployed sparingly, sometimes in great, powerful blocks, leaving one with an undeniable impression of Tevot’s overwhelmingly symphonic nature.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.