Darknesse Visible (1992)

The title comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “No light but rather darkness visible/Served only to discover sights of woe.” The material comes from John Dowland’s In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell. Adès’s luminous treatment of the song doesn’t so much shed light on it as make its components visible from any number of different points of view, isolating them, realigning them, recolouring them. The composer himself refers to the piece as an “explosion” of the song – which, presumably, shouldn’t be taken to mean a sudden release of energy but rather its aftermath, with the notes of In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell scattered through the whole range of the keyboard in new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic relationships. They are not, however, beyond at least partial reassembly. The process, though shorter and very much more crytpic, is not unlike that of Britten’s Lachrymae, his “reflections on a song of John Dowland,” which reveals its source only at the end.

At the same time – as befits a piece written for first performance in the recital hall of the Franz Liszt House in Budapest – Darknesse Visible is a formidable, though not at all showy, study in piano sonorities. It might be attributing too much to the Hungarian connection but it could be the inspiration for a consistently prominent feature of the scoring: the cimbalom-like repeated notes which, usually very quietly, colour one or two lines of the multi-faceted, multi-coloured texture. It is not easy to discern the background influence of the song while the ear is more likely to be caught by the extremes of pitch and dynamics but it is there – most clesarly of all in the closing bars where Adès silences the distractions and adds a legatissimo (ppppp) echo of Dowland’s first line.

The title comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “No light but rather darkness visible/Served only to discover sights of woe.” The material comes from John Dowland’s In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell. Adès’s luminous treatment of the song doesn’t so much shed light on it as make its components visible from any number of different points of view, isolating them, realigning them, recolouring them. The composer himself refers to the piece as an “explosion” of the song – which, presumably, shouldn’t be taken to mean a sudden release of energy but rather its aftermath, with the notes of In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell scattered through the whole range of the keyboard in new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic relationships. They are not, however, beyond at least partial reassembly. The process, though shorter and very much more cryptic, is not unlike that of Britten’s Lachrymae, his “reflections on a song of John Dowland,” which reveals its source only at the end.

At the same time – as befits a piece written for first performance in the recital hall of the Franz Liszt House in Budapest – Darknesse Visible is a formidable, though not at all showy, study in piano sonorities. It might be attributing too much to the Hungarian connection but it could be the inspiration for a consistently prominent feature of the scoring: the cimbalom-like repeated notes which, usually very quietly, colour one or two lines of the multi-faceted, multi-coloured texture. It is not easy to discern the background influence of the song while the ear is more likely to be caught by the extremes of pitch and dynamics but it is there – most clearly of all in the closing bars where Adès silences the distractions and adds a legatissimo (ppppp) echo of Dowland’s first line.