John Adams and Thomas Adès offer new takes on a beloved form.
Illustration of Ades and Adams
Composers writing concertos must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics.Illustration by Sergiy Maidukov

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box.

Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady demand for them, always threatening to become a glut—must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics. In the disillusioned twentieth century, the standard Romantic narrative of heroic struggle fell from fashion. The soloist more often acted the part of a solitary wanderer, traversing the damaged landscapes of modernity. Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, composed in 1935, follows a trajectory of crisis, lamentation, and dissolution. In Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto, written three decades later, the soloist is all but trampled underfoot by a rampaging orchestra.

Two significant recent concertos dismantle the duality of self and community that has long governed the form. Chaya Czernowin’s “Guardian,” for cello and orchestra, inverts the polarity, so that, in the composer’s words, “the cello grows to include the orchestra within its resonant body.” The solo instrument is amplified, allowing the slightest touches of bow on string to carry into the hall. Liza Lim’s “Speak, Be Silent” places a solo violin amid an ensemble dominated by wind, brass, and percussion. Lim’s extraordinary ear for timbre and texture brings about a synthesis of disparate voices, illustrating the work’s epigraph, from Rumi: “Just remember, when you’re in union, / you don’t have to fear / that you’ll be drained.”

The ever-formidable British composer Thomas Adès takes a different tack in his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which had its première at the Boston Symphony on March 7th, with a Carnegie Hall performance to follow on March 20th. Here is an unabashed showpiece in the grand manner, replete with thundering double octaves, frame-rattling two-hand chords, and keyboard-sweeping glissandos. A program note written by Adès is almost comically old-fashioned, inviting the audience to listen for first and second themes, development and recapitulation, and so on. Yet the work is far more than an exercise in nostalgia. It is an unruly romp across familiar terrain—at once a paean to tradition and a sophisticated burlesque of it.

The soloist at the first performances, which Adès conducted, was the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein. Few concertos have ever been more immaculately tailored to their first interpreter. Gerstein is a heavyweight performer, having conquered Liszt’s monstrously difficult Transcendental Études. In 2017, he joined the Boston Symphony for a rare performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s even more monstrous Piano Concerto. (A recording of that outing was recently released by the Myrios Classics label.) Some of Adès’s madcap writing in the concerto may doff a hat to Busoni’s Mephistophelian masterpiece. Adès also nods to the fact that Gerstein is a serious jazz player, a brilliant exponent of Gershwin. It can’t be an accident that the concerto’s opening gesture brushes against the intervals of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”

The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn. Trumpets and trombones join in with wah-wah mutes. Adès’s fractal orchestration and atomizing interplay of intervals keep the Jazz Age ambience at a distance: nothing stays fixed. In the recapitulation, the Bette Davis theme assumes grander proportions, with solemn, unmuted horns in attendance. The first theme returns in the coda, amid delirious orchestral commentary. A pell-mell duet of piccolo and xylophone had me on the brink of laughing out loud.

The middle movement, marked “Andante gravemente,” plunges into melancholy. A funereal procession of winds and brass, more or less in B-flat minor, leads into a courtly, neo-Baroque theme. An intricately expressive countermelody floats high into the piano’s upper register, adorned with Chopinesque curlicues. An atmosphere of dejection gathers as the piano becomes fixated on a three-note pattern and the orchestra sinks into the bass regions. Many concertos draw a contrast between bravura and sorrowful moods; here the division is stark enough that it suggests the musical equivalent of manic depression.

The finale begins where the first movement left off, in a state of controlled chaos. The orchestra squawks and snorts, a clarinet caterwauls, the piano cartwheels through complex polyrhythms, themes devolve into disjointed practice scales; an attempt at a noble chorale is pitched too high and becomes ridiculous. These antics lead to a crisis and another depressive standstill. A joyously anarchic coda overcomes the lingering shadows. The failed chorale assumes properly grandiose proportions, although it is undercut by an over-the-top cascade of double octaves, doubled goofily by glockenspiel. A cracking whip and a thudding bass drum bring this sublime conjuration to an end. If anyone in the audience guffawed, a huge ovation covered it.

The same week that the Adès made its début in Boston, the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced a new concerto by John Adams, titled “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” Yuja Wang was the soloist, and Gustavo Dudamel conducted. Adams’s playful title, quoting a remark apocryphally attributed to Martin Luther, led me to expect another example of what the composer has called his “trickster” mode—the most notorious instance being “Grand Pianola Music,” from 1982, in which Beethoven’s “Emperor” arpeggios are thrown into a mixer with Rachmaninoff and ragtime. Some of that spirit persists in “Must the Devil,” but it turns out to be one of Adams’s darker, more abstract utterances.

The piece begins in trickster style, with the soloist playing a funky ostinato modelled on Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme and a detuned honky-tonk piano adding offbeat accents. As this jollity grinds on, though, it takes on a machinelike brutality. A composer who has long used popular material to poke at the solemnity of the classical tradition here seems to be exposing the dominating urge behind much pop music. One hears echoes of apocalyptic episodes in Adams’s latter-day stage works: the doom-laden Corn Dance of “Doctor Atomic,” the malignant Americana of “Girls of the Golden West.”

Whereas the slow movement of the Adès concerto suggests an inward despair, the middle section of “Must the Devil” tries to escape into a meditative sphere. The piano is given a delicately meandering unaccompanied melody; Wang, virtuosic even in pianissimo, made it glisten in the air. The orchestra seems uncertain how to respond, and a full-blown lyrical episode fails to develop. The piano, ringing variations on its theme, falls into a bouncing tarantella rhythm. The orchestra seizes on this playful pattern, giving it a monotonous, ominous thrust. Thus begins the finale, which resumes and intensifies the first movement’s abrasive drive.

The ending is abrupt and chilling. Three times, the strings intervene with sustained D’s in stacked octaves, as if issuing warnings. A brutal last stampede is cut short by a blaring dissonance in the horns and a reverberating chime—an alarm like the one that sounds in “Doctor Atomic” just before the final detonation. On the East Coast, Adès offers a mirage of joy; on the West Coast, Adams stares into the storm. ♦