Alchymia

Alchymia is written for clarinet quintet, the same combination as clarinet with string quartet used by Mozart and Brahms, but Adès fills it with borrowed material that he bends and reshapes, true to the piece's title, an old spelling of "alchemy." The suite moves through several linked sections rather than four separate movements. Early on, listen for "A Sea-Change (...those are pearls that were his eyes...)," its title drawn from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest about a body transformed underwater into coral and pearl; the music has a similarly submerged, glinting quality, sounds heard as if through water. "The Woods So Wild" reworks a Tudor-era tune that composers from William Byrd onward have set, here fragmented and passed between instruments. "Lachrymae" nods to the Elizabethan composer John Dowland's famous tears-themed music, its falling melodic shapes echoing that old tradition of musical weeping. The closing "Divisions on a Lute-song: Wedekind's Round" takes a round associated with the German writer Frank Wedekind and puts it through continuous variation, the "divisions" of the title, building energy toward the end. Throughout, the clarinet often behaves like a singer, bending pitch and tone color, while the strings supply harmonic ground that keeps shifting underfoot.

Thomas Adès composed Alchymia in 2021 for clarinet and string quartet, a scoring with a long pedigree stretching back to Mozart. The title, an archaic spelling of "alchemy," signals the piece's method: rather than writing wholly new melodic material, Adès takes older musical and literary sources, a Shakespearean image of transformation, a Tudor folk tune, an Elizabethan tradition of mourning music, and a round linked to the German writer Frank Wedekind, and passes them through his own harmonic language, changing their character while keeping something of their original identity audible. The work continues Adès's long-standing practice of engaging directly with earlier music, evident in other pieces that quote or refract Purcell, Couperin, and others. It has entered the chamber repertoire performed by clarinetists and string players internationally since its premiere years.