In Seven Days, for piano and orchestra

Program notes

About the Work

In Seven Days is a piano concerto by Thomas Adès, though it was not conceived as a conventional one. Its full title is In Seven Days: Concerto for Piano with Moving Image, and it was written as a kind of video ballet in collaboration with the artist Tal Rosner, then Adès’s partner. The Southbank Centre and the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned it jointly, and it was first performed at the Royal Festival Hall on 28 April 2008, with Nicolas Hodges as soloist and Adès conducting the London Sinfonietta. The US premiere followed in Los Angeles a month later. Rosner’s video, projected on six screens at the premiere, used footage and photographs of the two commissioning buildings, the Royal Festival Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall, and their surroundings. The film is optional, and the music has since had a life of its own in the concert hall.

The subject is the Creation, as told in the Book of Genesis, and the work runs continuously through seven sections, one for each day:

1. Chaos, Light, Darkness
2. Separation of the Waters into Sea and Sky
3. Land, Grass, Trees
4. Stars, Sun, Moon
5. Fugue: Creatures of the Sea and Sky
6. Fugue: Creatures of the Land
7. Contemplation

Adès’s note explains the design. The whole piece is a set of variations, shaped to match the two-part structure of the Genesis story: the first three days (light, sky and sea, land) are mirrored by the next three, which fill each of those realms with sun and stars, with birds and fish, and with land animals. Only on the seventh day is the theme presented in its simplest form. So the work runs backwards against the usual variation form, arriving at its plain theme at the end rather than stating it at the start.

Critics took to it quickly. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times heard music ‘at once reverent and playful’, and the Observer’s reviewer, quoted by Adès’s publisher, felt that the edgy, often ironic vitality of his earlier scores had relaxed into ‘a new fluidity and lyricism’. Adès has conducted the work with the LSO before, and here he is joined by Bertrand Chamayou, a French pianist with a long record of working closely with living composers.

What to Listen For

The opening is chaos: a churning, formless mass from which clearer shapes slowly emerge. Listen for the moment light breaks through. From there, try to track the variations. Each ‘day’ has its own character and colour, and the piano is less a star soloist in front of the orchestra than a restless, glittering thread running through the texture, full of spiralling, cascading figures.

The fifth and sixth days are fugues, which is a good place to listen for Adès’s humour. Tommasini described twittering flutes and a ‘crazed piccolo’ for the creatures of the sky, and lumbering basses and low brass for the creatures of the land.

Then comes Contemplation. After all that activity, the theme appears in its simplest form, slowly, and the music thins out towards silence, as though the work of creation is done.