America: A Prophecy

Program notes

About the Work

America: A Prophecy is one of Thomas Adès’s most powerful and unsettling works. Like the Saariaho, it was written for the New York Philharmonic and premiered there under Kurt Masur in November 1999, as part of a series of pieces marking the new millennium. Tonight it is heard in the composer’s 2024 version for soprano, orchestra and chorus. Adès delivered not a celebration but a ‘prophecy’ of doom. He set ancient Mayan texts from the books of Chilam Balam, prophecies of the destruction of the Mayan world by foreign invaders, for a solo voice, while the chorus sings 15th- and 16th-century Spanish and Latin texts of war and conquest. The result is a searing meditation on the collision of civilisations, on conquest and apocalypse, with obvious and deliberate resonance for the Americas and for any culture facing its own end.

The music is correspondingly stark and visionary: the lone voice of the doomed culture lamenting and prophesying, set against the relentless, militaristic weight of the conquerors. It is taut, dramatic and harmonically arresting, with Adès’s characteristic brilliance of orchestration turned to dark, ominous ends. Hearing the composer himself conduct it, at the end of a programme threading sea, time and fate, gives the evening a stark and prophetic conclusion.

What to Listen For

Listen for the central opposition that drives the piece: the solo soprano, the voice of the Mayan prophecy lamenting the foretold destruction, set against the chorus, which delivers the harsh, militaristic texts of the European conquerors. The two forces inhabit different sound-worlds, and their collision is the work’s subject.

Adès is a master orchestrator, so listen for the vivid, often menacing colours: ominous low sonorities, sharp percussion, music that conveys foreboding and catastrophe. The vocal writing for the soprano is intense and exposed, by turns keening and incantatory. This is not comfortable music. It is a ‘prophecy’ of doom, deliberately disquieting, building a sense of inexorable fate. Let its starkness land, and notice how, after the shimmering seas of Sibelius and Saariaho, the concert ends not in consolation but in dark, prophetic warning.