In his new piano concerto Thomas Ades’s inspiration has completely dried up

There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer.

You knew there was something wrong after ten seconds. The piano played a rapid sequence of notes against a busy orchestral accompaniment. It felt like we’d been dropped right into the middle of things. Gyorgy Ligeti’s Piano Concerto of 1988 does much the same thing; in fact, it’s hard to think of two pieces of music whose opening bars sound so similar.