Adès has the gift of seizing your attention with strange but ravishingly beautiful sonorities and then holding it with entrancingly mysterious inventions that allure the ear. Yet he also has the much rarer quality of inspiring utter confidence. His style can't be defined by simply describing any one of these pieces.
Each solves a new problem or investigates a new scenario with such adroitness and completeness that it seems a quite new and delightful adventure. In Still sorrowing the starting point is a piano whose central register is muted with a strip of plastic adhesive. The effect on those pitches is obvious: they are dulled to a sort of subdued drumming, but by observing the new light that this casts on the undamped upper and lower registers Adès effectively invents a new and alluring instrument, or rather three of them. And he plays them with poetry and wonder.
Catch is a game in which a piano trio tempt and tease an off-stage clarinet; he eventually joins them in sober homophony, for this is a game with serious and lyrical substance as well as a jest. A similar but more ambiguous game is played in Under Hamelin Hill, where the piping toccata of one organist attracts two others to join him in co-operative apparent improvisation, but he's left alone for a shadowy soliloquy filled with shudders.
Darknesse visible is a haunting meditation in which the presence of John Dowland is clearest where the music seems least like him; a magical illusion as well as a moving homage. In Life story the soprano is asked to imitate the manner of Billie Holiday in her wry reflection on a casual one-night encounter; it's the dark, searching piano that adds pity and bleakness to turn this into a riveting miniature opera. Traced overhead is filled with mysterious, glancing references to remembered piano music, but is grippingly coherent. And as if this weren't enough, in the Eliot settings, Op 1, the 17-year-old Adès already proved himself a song-writer of rare talent.
The performances are first-rate.