Thomas Adès

All compositions

Living Toys

chamber ensemble of 14 players

Year
1993
Duration
00:17:00
Category
  • Mixed Chamber Ensemble

Instrumentation

1(=picc).1(=ca+sopranino recorder).1(=Ebcl+bcl).1(=cbsn) – 1(=whip).1(=ptpt).1.0 – perc(1): 3 gongs/2 timp/2 crot/talking drum/tgl/2 susp.cym/suspended sheet of paper/2 c.bell/2 tpl.bl/guero/cast/piccolo SD/field drum/kit BD/vibraslap – pno – 2 vln.vla.vlc.db

Commission

Commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for the London Sinfonietta

Programme notes

I Angels

II Aurochs

-BALETT-

III Militiamen

IV H.A.L.’s Death

-BATTLE-

V Playing Funerals

-TABLET-

“When the men asked him what he wanted to be, the child did not name any of their own occupations, as they had all hoped he would, but replied: ‘I am going to be a hero, and dance with angels and bulls, and fight with bulls and soldiers, and die a hero in outer space, and be buried a hero’. Seeing him standing there, the man felt small, understanding that they were not heroes, and that their lives were less substantial than the dreams which surrounded the child like toys.”

anon. (from the Spanish)

The child/hero’s dream-adventures form the five ‘figurative’ sections, offset by three more volatile, dynamic paragraphs: painting versus film, perhaps.

First Angels, a long horn solo haloed with gongs and little trumpets. Then, with a change in tempo and the first bass note (a B), into the ring charges an Aurochs (the extinct European bison). He is whipped and goaded by the brutal, elegant matodor-kid until his bellows of defeat (horn again) metamorphose into the first appearance of a ‘hero’s theme’. This rolling, square tune, makes three appearances, immediately preceding each of the three unnumbered sections (BALETT etc.). In these, there is a reordering of shared material (hence anagrammatical titles): three-voice descending chords, each voice restricted to a single interval. Recurring in BATTLE and dominating TABLET, this material is evolved in BALETT from a fragment of the bullfight out of which it flies: descending E-D-C (horn, inversion of the start of the hero’s theme), combined with the angelic horn solo (trombone, this time).

The BALETT cadences abruptly on a menacing octave ‘B’ where the hero has a bad dream – a grotesque army, led by a pair of virtuosi (one is a maniacal drummer, the other has a nightmarish talking bugle), advances on him to the point when – it being forbidden to dream one’s own death – he switches dreams. He is in a film, in deepest space, dismantling a great computer, whose vast intelligence dwindles to a wilting Vicwardian music-hall waltz (contrabasson and double-bass). It is the gentlest of executions, and the little astronaut whistles his tune like the sweet fifing of a tiny recorder.

There follows an unstoppable, suffocating BATTLE, in which the monstrous militiamen reappear and (E minor climax) finish their fell work. Our hero dreams himself a full military funeral, with muffled drums and tear-blurred mass humming of his tune; a TABLET is erected, and there is a three-gun salute, or three cheers, or three rockets, or three big puffs of dust as the story book is slammed shut and he drifts off to join his first adversaries.

© 1994 Thomas Adès

Reviews

‘Armitage has an affinity for the music of young British composer Thomas Adès. Her title comes from a stunning work for 14 soloists that Adès composed a decade ago, when he was barely out of his teens… Praise must go to Rambert’s orchestra, London Musici, and its conductor, Paul Hoskins. They find all the fizz embedded within this mesmerising music… [The ballet] revels in the high calibre of the company’s dancers… Armitage’s Merce Cunningham connection underpins the structure, particularly in the masterful ways she scatters and disperses dancers across the stage in brief but fulsome incidents of densely charged movement.’

The Times (Allen Robertson), 2 June 2003

‘Mark Baldwin's promise that, as new director of Rambert, he would revitalise the music, as well as the dance repertory, has been kept by his very first company commission. Living Toys is set to the 1993 score in which Thomas Adès sealed his reputation as a unique conjuror of sound magic. Even without its title as a clue, you'd hear the stuff of a Hoffmannesque nursery tale in this score's astonishing instrumentation, its clamour of shrieks and flutters, its thin dreams and dark nightmares… Living Toys is a piece you certainly want to see again.’

The Guardian (Judith Mackrell), 2 June 2003

'Living Toys, a Sinfonietta commission, proved a remarkable essay. It is remarkable for its intricate facture (it is notated with meticulous yet never over-fussy precision; for its bizarrely effective scoring; and for its crabbed but powerful coherence of form… The work had a wonderfully dense, dynamic impact.'

The Sunday Times (Paul Driver), 20 February 1994

'Twenty-two is a rather young age to be writing a symphonie fantastique, which is what Adès’ realisation of a child’s dream, with its Berlioz-like obsession with nightmare military marches, grotesque deaths, and funeral cortèges, amounts to. But Adès carries the whole thing off brilliantly.'

Financial Times (Stephen Pettitt), 24 August 1997

Availability

Score 0571517064 on sale, parts for hire

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