The comparativist

Pianist Madeleine Brown graced Christ Church earlier today before a crowd of nearly 200 musical devotees who braved sunny Southport’s heat – and received, in recompense, one of the finest concerts of the season. Her opening piece, «Darknesse Visible» by Londoner Thomas Adès, was a precise, heartfelt rendition of this 1992 work that seems to have as its subject-matter the materiality of the present: by this I mean that «Darknesse Visible» not only seems to escape generic classification, for its impressionistic, Ravelian first part is, if we’re to label it, post-postmodern; neo-romantic, perhaps, if it were out of context; but it is within context, and throughout it the schism that fights against labels grows. It’s a work that speaks to the now, to whatever this age of hashtags, thirty-second Instagram videos and compressed thought-by-label will be called by future philosophers: all diametrically (and thankfully) opposed to by «Darkness Visible», a «Gaspard de la Nuit» revisited, a piec...