Asyla, Op. 17

Program notes

About the Work

Thomas Adès was twenty-six when he completed Asyla in 1997, on a commission from the John Feeney Charitable Trust for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its young music director Simon Rattle. The premiere, in Birmingham that October under Rattle, was an immediate sensation; Rattle thought so highly of the piece that he chose it for his inaugural concert as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002, an extraordinary vote of confidence in a composer barely past thirty. In 2000 Asyla won the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and it has since been performed across the world, the work that established Adès as a major orchestral voice.

The title is a deliberate puzzle. ‘Asyla’ is the plural of ‘asylum’, a word that carries two opposed meanings in English. An asylum is a place of refuge and safety; it is also, in older usage, a place of confinement for the insane. Adès plays on both senses at once. The four movements explore different kinds of sanctuary and different kinds of madness, places one might flee to and places one might be locked into. The ambiguity is the point: shelter and incarceration, peace and derangement, are never far apart, and the music slips between them.

Adès scored the work for a large orchestra deployed with characteristic ingenuity, including an array of tuned and untuned percussion and, strikingly, an upright piano tuned a quarter-tone flat, which lends certain passages an eerie, out-of-true shimmer, as if the music were sounding through warped glass. His orchestration throughout is brilliant and unconventional: bass oboe, cowbells, and a battery of metallic percussion sit alongside the conventional forces, producing textures that gleam, clatter, and dissolve in ways that recall both the precision of a machine and the disorientation of a dream.

The most famous movement is the third, marked ‘Ecstasio,’ an unabashed evocation of a techno nightclub: the relentless four-on-the-floor pulse, the build-ups and drops, the chemical euphoria of dance music transmuted into orchestral terms. It is at once exhilarating and faintly sinister, a portrait of communal release that is also a kind of mass trance, and it remains one of the most arresting things any composer has done with the orchestra in recent decades. Around it the other three movements offer their own asylums (uneasy calm, frantic energy, and a final, hard-won quiet), making Asyla a compact symphony for the turn of the millennium.

What to Listen For

Asyla unfolds in four movements that together form a single arc. The first opens with delicate, glinting percussion and that quarter-tone-flat upright piano, establishing a soundworld of bells, tuned metals, and uncertain tuning; listen for how the music seems to assemble itself out of glittering fragments, tentative and searching, before gathering into something more urgent.

The second movement is the work’s slow heart: brooding, lyrical, dominated by a long, keening melody on the bass oboe, an instrument so rarely heard that its dark, plangent voice is unmistakable. There is grief here, and a strange tenderness, the sound of a refuge that is also a confinement.

The third movement, ‘Ecstasio,’ is the one to wait for. Out of nothing a pounding dance beat materialises, four square beats to the bar, and the orchestra is transformed into a vast nightclub: synthesised-sounding riffs, surging crescendos, sudden ‘drops,’ the whole machinery of techno rendered by acoustic instruments. It is thrilling and a little frightening, euphoria with an edge of loss of control.

The finale brings the comedown. The dance dissolves, and the music gropes its way back toward stillness, recalling fragments of earlier movements before settling into a fragile, exhausted calm. Listen for the way Adès lets the brilliance ebb away, ending not in triumph but in a quiet that feels both like sanctuary and like emptiness: the two faces of asylum, held in balance to the last.