ADÈS, THOMAS:
Dante (ballet)
Conductor: Dudamel, Gustavo
Orchestra: Los Angeles Philharmonic
Record Label: Nonesuch – 075597906165
Medium: CD
A big contemporary ballet score based on The Divine Comedy sounds like the kind of cultural mega-object you’re supposed to admire more than enjoy. But Adès, who once seemed in danger of becoming merely the best-connected clever boy in British music, has written the real thing: a full-scale, serious, vividly imagined modern work that actually earns its ambition. The surprise isn’t that it exists. The surprise is that it’s fun.
The hook, naturally, is Inferno, because Hell always gets the best material. Adès knows this and leans in hard. Wasps, whirlwinds, slime, suicides, hypocrites, thieves, Satan—this is damnation with momentum, color, and enough orchestral imagination to keep it from stiffening into worthy modernist pageant. The language is contemporary but not doctrinaire: often tonal, sometimes melodic, frequently textural, and almost always vivid. The result moves.
Then comes the problem every Dante setting has to solve: once you leave Hell, things tend to get less dramatically juicy. Adès’s answer in Purgatorio is unusually smart. He turns it into a prayerful interlude using recorded voices drawn from synagogue chant, weaving liturgical sound into the orchestra in a way that feels personal, conceptually alert, and musically convincing. There are moments when the congregational atmosphere edges toward the overly familiar, but the idea is strong enough to survive that.
Paradiso is still the hardest stretch. Paradise is notoriously difficult to make interesting, because radiance can turn static fast, and Adès doesn’t completely beat the problem. This final section is beautiful, spacious, brilliant, and skillfully built, but at 26 minutes it slightly overstays its welcome. The wordless female chorus near the end feels like an unnecessary touch of celestial upholstery. Still, Adès is too shrewd to let the piece dissolve into pious vapor. The closing pages arrive with real force.
What matters most is that this isn’t empty contemporary grandstanding. Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic play magnificently, the sound is marvelous, and the whole thing feels like the rare large-scale institutional project that justifies itself on purely musical terms. Adès comes off not as a hyped product of old booster networks, but as a genuine major composer writing thoughtful, substantial, unapologetically ambitious music. And in a culture that barely knows how to sustain major contemporary works, that counts for plenty.
