Ades ends his L.A. stay with a range of moods

“NO word from Tom” is the best-known aria from “The Rake’s Progress.” Stravinsky wrote his end-of-the-road opera in the West Hollywood hills overlooking Sunset Boulevard between 1948 and 1951. But afterward, he could no longer sustain its neoclassical style; the powerful 12-tone method of his neighbor and nemesis, Schoenberg, was too persuasive. World War II had ended. The Atomic Age had dawned. Stravinsky desired a new direction, a word from Tom.

Half a century later, it’s we who’ve got it. At least, Thomas Ades’ two-week residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which concluded Tuesday night with a Green Umbrella concert in Walt Disney Concert Hall, felt like that revelatory word.

No, the British Ades is not the next Stravinsky, any more than he is the next Benjamin Britten. Nor is he the first composer to successfully find a style that acknowledges the still evident pull of earlier classical music (Stravinsky’s late 12-tone pieces never caught on the way his earlier music did) and everything else that is out there these days.

But he has found a way to bring together a lot stylistically. His music is a celebration both of what classical music has been and of what it can be. It doesn’t always smile. In fact, it can be troubled by a bittersweet, succulent melancholy and shot through with chilling, sharp attacks of anger. But when Ades does smile, the whole world seems to smile with him -- or might, if more of the world paid attention to this marvelous music.

Last week, having performed chamber music by Beethoven and Schubert with Philharmonic players and then conducted the orchestra in the U.S. premieres of his effervescent new Violin Concerto and enchanted excerpts from his second opera, “The Tempest,” Ades took to the piano again. He performed an enthralling program of Stravinsky’s violin and piano music with Anthony Marwood (the soloist in the Violin Concerto) at the Doheny Mansion for the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College.

And Tuesday, he oversaw his Green Umbrella outing with the Philharmonic’s New Music Group as composer, curator, conductor and pianist. He led one of his earliest pieces, the Chamber Symphony, written in 1991 and an odd, nose-thumbing (but not completely) homage to Schoenberg. He played in his recent neoclassical (but not entirely) Piano Quintet. He programmed Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag’s poignant but ferociously penetrating song cycle, “Scenes From a Novel.” And he conducted the first U.S. performances of Italian modernist Niccolo Castiglioni’s hauntingly offbeat “Cantus Planus” along with his own fantastical, darkly sensual “The Origin of the Harp,” for three clarinetists, three violists, three cellists and two percussionists.

It was quite a night, full of ghosts having a heck of a party. I don’t know if Stravinsky looked on. He might still have been hung over after the party given by Ades and Marwood with the violin/piano arrangements, which concluded with the “Danse Russe” from “Petrushka” as animated as I’ve ever heard it.

But Schoenberg might have gotten a chuckle out of the way the then 20-year-old Ades brightly warmed up his Chamber Symphony, Opus 2, with a jazz drum solo before heading into darker territory. After that piece, Ades began a decade of manic deconstruction, his music finding its own highly distinctive character by pulling apart music from many different styles and centuries, always surprising but always making sense.

Lately, Ades has evinced a neoclassical bent. The 2001 Piano Quintet is a rapturous 20-minute work in Schubertian sonata form that keeps going deliriously astray.

No one can say quite what Kurtag’s style is. He seems to have absorbed and then condensed into something all his own much of the 20th century. Accompanied by violin, bass and cimbalom, the soprano Elizabeth Keusch (a last-minute replacement for Valdine Anderson, sidelined by the flu) conveyed Kurtag’s quirky extravagances as well as the pain and sorrow of 15 short songs to existential Russian texts by Rimma Dalos.

Because she was called in suddenly, Keusch could prepare only the first half of Castiglioni’s “Cantus Planus,” a series of tiny 12-tone songs to peculiar 17th century religious texts.

Composed for two sopranos who play cat and mouse with each other in their highest registers, the vocal writing is even more outrageous than Kurtag’s. Cynthia Sieden was the other soprano, and the performance was ingratiatingly flamboyant. Castiglioni was among Ades’ teachers (as well as Esa-Pekka Salonen’s), and from him Ades clearly learned to go beyond style, to go where no one else does.

In the last two weeks, Ades has won an enthusiastic following in Los Angeles. The Philharmonic has asked him back next season. A long-range relationship appears to be developing. The word from Tom has been worth the wait.