Gramophone Awards
2020
Finalist - Contemporary

Presto Recording of the Week
6th March 2020

Gramophone Magazine
May 2020
Editor's Choice

Mark Stone (baritone), Kirill Gerstein (piano), Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano), Boston Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Adès

Adès: Concerto for piano and orchestra
Adès: Totentanz

In March 2020, Thomas Adès, one of the most acclaimed and most frequently performed contemporary composers of our time, conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Gerstein performing the world premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Comissioned by the BSO for Kirill Gerstein the work already is becoming part of the concert repertoire worldwide.

This live recording of what turned out to be a ravishing celebration of contemporary music, receiving rapturous response from audience and critics alike, is paired on the album with Adès’s 2013 work Totentanz.

Totentanz brings together baritone (Mark Stone) and mezzo-soprano (Christianne Stotijn) soloists with a (very) large orchestra, unfolding a dialogue between a charismatic and gleefully macabre Grim Reaper and the procession of his many victims, from Pope to Maiden and Child.

"Gerstein and the Boston Symphony pull the piano concerto off with flair but this performance [Totentanz] is a cut above...it can hardly have sounded as focused or as forensically brilliant as in Boston, with the same structural nous, sustained tension (tempos and volume are expertly ratcheted) and pronounced undertow...for proof that Adès does what he does with mind-boggling brilliance, look no further." - Gramophone Magazine, May 2020.