It’s no surprise that “Dante” was greeted with prolonged, fiery standing ovations on Thursday. Adès is by no means an avant-garde, and this work, for all its sophistication, is completely approachable – legibly fun, lively and, towards the end, glorious. With the exception of the recorded song used in ‘Purgatorio’, he writes with much the same means as a composer of a century ago: a happy reminder of how alive and well the orchestra can be as a medium and instrument.
In ‘Inferno’ he follows the path of Dante’s text – beginning in the ‘Abandon Hope’ section, with pervasive darkness and a downward plunge reminiscent of the ‘Dante’ symphony. But while Liszt haunts “Inferno”, the craft is Adès’s: features like full, divisi strings; excess at both ends of the dynamic spectrum; and gauge that changes with size.
From there, the circles of hell serve as ready-made divertissements, episodes of character that, however oblique, evoke the poetic justice delivered to Dante’s sinners. There are sections of sensuality and sludgy stasis; strings rattle and murmur with mischief; and horrors of war akin to, well, hellfire. Chromatic walking movements, up and down on unsteady ground, are reminiscent of Liszt’s “Bagatelle Sans Tonalité”. Adès also nods to “E semper lava!” from Puccini’s “Tosca”? Maybe also Tchaikovsky and the Dies Irae? You can never be sure.
Liszt appears, more explicitly, in the climactic “Thieves” section, a cacophonous dance that would seem parody if it weren’t so fondly resembling the “Grand Galop Chromatique”. Here, freed from all choreographic constraints, Dudamel gradually picked up the pace in a desperate race with the audience applauding halfway through the performance; and how could they not?
With a running time of about 45 minutes, “Inferno” takes up about half of the “Dante” score, but doesn’t loom over the signature personalities of “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”, which came after a break.