Ades: America: A Prophecy.(Sound Recording Review)

[] With other pieces by Ades. Bickley, McFadden; Blaze, Maltman; Watkins, piano; Polyphony Layton; Composers Ensemble, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Ades. Texts and translations. EMI Classics 5 57610 2

The ferociously gifted Thomas Ades, thirty-two-year-old wunderkind of British music, was one of six composers commissioned in 1999 by the New York Philharmonic to compose "messages for the millennium" on the eve of Y2K. It is hardly surprising that Ades, whose gift for attracting attention almost matches his gift for composing rivetingly original music, contributed the most startling piece to the project. Yet it is absolutely shocking the way his America: A Prophecy, in hindsight, seems to have predicted the September 11 catastrophe.

Ades's text (an ancient Mayan lament) and his stated sources of musical inspiration (popular melodies from the Spanish Renaissance) point to the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of the Yucatan peninsula, but the piece resounds as a universal warning to any civilization that considers itself immune to attack. The text by itself is chilling enough: "O, my nation.... They will come from the east.... They will burn all the land.... They will burn all the sky.... It is foretold.... On earth we shall burn." And the prophecy has an implicit indictment: the people of this unwitting nation are careless, ignorant and debauched.

Although it's now impossible not to hear this piece in the context of 9/11, one still marvels at Ades's unceasing musical invention. The clangorous intrusions on a simple, repeating three-note phrase imply doom when the piece is barely ten seconds old. Emerging from the backdrop of orchestral frenzy, ...