We got rhythm – Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra in Ravel, Adams and Reveueltas

Concert programs nowadays are often themed. Sometimes the idea is obvious, sometimes trite, but even attempting to present such a program is preferable to a parade of pop classics. Sometimes real imagination has gone into the selected words, and the link may not be obvious. Whether or not the works chosen by Josep Vicent in last night’s ADDA concert in Alicante were consciously selected to illustrate a theme of the rhythm of popular dance, as transformed by composers who did not take instructions literally, is irrelevant. But that was the theme that came across to this captivated listener.

The evening potentially was a challenge for those concertgoers who live mainly in the repertoire already known to them, but no one attending this concert went away in any way challenged. Indeed, everyone left enlightened by the experience.

The ADDA orchestra opened with Ravel’s La Valse. Now this is a regularly misunderstood work, not least originally by those who commissioned it! It still suggests a dance, which is what it is. And yet, it isn’t. It might start like a dance, but it ends like a nightmare. It’s a waltz dreamed up by a composer at the height of his imaginative powers, and it is a thoroughly surreal work, not at all what it might seem at first hearing. In fact, this is one of those works that seems to change with repeated listening. First impressions retain the sweet theme. Later familiarity stresses the dissonant clashes.

Using a large and powerfully scored orchestra, a gentle dance theme transforms into a war-like threat, literally a nightmare of oppression, all delivered with a smile as the dagger goes in. If I have a criticism, which I don’t, I might suggest the work’s power is best delivered by not interpreting each phrase manneristically. When the line of the waltz predominates, the side-roads of the musical argument, the diversions that give the piece meaning, are rendered all the more powerful. In this performance, Josep Vicent chose to stress every phrase, almost to isolate it. And beautiful it was, certainly exciting, but the whole experience possibly suffered because the side-roads became the main route. The orchestral playing by our resident ADDA orchestra, as ever, was breath-taking.

And then we heard Absolute Jest by John Adams with the Casals Quartet as soloists. This is a work where John Adams takes well-known Beethoven and reinterprets it by interleaving it with his own material, ostensibly to re-create childhood experiences of his hearing the late quartets of Beethoven so often.

Now it must be remembered the Beethoven regularly used dance rhythm in his work. Like Ravel in La Valse, he often stretched these rhythms into musically interesting but absurd forms. And in Absolute Jest this double take adopts a third layer as John Adams interleaves his own material that both contrasts with and complements the original. The effect is utterly surreal. It’s like encountering the familiar in a place you have never visited. As in La Valse, these are not familiar phrases in a changed context, they are memories of the familiar where almost nothing makes sense, as in a dream. Apart, that is, from the rhythm, which, like a home key for Haydn, keeps reasserting itself and thus keeping the strangeness of the experience at home, rendering the whole doubly surprising.

As an encore, the Casals Quartet played the second movement of Beethoven’s Op135. It is a piece that Absolute Jest featured prominently amongst its quoted material. Standalone, it’s a piece that reminds an audience of just how revolutionary a composer Beethoven was. It is a piece that hardly exists. What is the theme? What is the harmony? All four players, like characters in Chekhov, seem to play only the subtext of a plot, and yet it comes together because insistent rhythms create lines. It is perhaps the most intangible thing Beethoven wrote.

And then, in the second half, we heard a real rarity. Silvestre Revueltas wrote film music for The Night of the Mayas. Paul Hindemith presented some of the music as a suite, and then José Ives-Limantour reassembled the material to form what might be seen as of four movement symphony. Using popular dance rhythms and re-imagined pre-Columbian sounds, Revueltas produced music as surreal is the Ravel that began the concert. The difference for a European audience was that the waltz form was familiar, but the dance forms and rhythms in the Revueltas were not. Here Mayan dances are presented and convince musically, despite the fact that neither the composer, nor perhaps anyone else, knew what they had sounded like. It is possibly patronising to say that, however, because Mayan culture is still very much alive!  

Convincing, however, it was. Extended passages where the percussion stood alone with only minimal commentary from the orchestra were perhaps the most memorable, simply because they were so different from what had gone before. And always we had the rhythm, that essential quality to which to evening had seemed to be dedicated.

As an encore, Josep Vicent and the ADDA orchestra offered the final part of Ravel’s Bolero. Another popular form, another rhythm, a three in a bar complicated by a composer who knew how to stretch the imagination! Another surreal image wrapped in incessant rhythm. Brilliant.