Thomas Adès's Op. 1 is a romantic, fanciful, finely wrought response to colourful minor poems of T. S. Eliot, with ingenuities unobtrusively tucked away into the composition. At the close of New Hampshire the piano sings in counterpoint Do you want the stars to play with, the moon to run away with? Rannoch explores chromatic scale descents as inventively as Verdi explored an enigmatic scale in his Ave Maria. They underpin, without jeopardizing, his spontaneous response to Eliot's lines. Cape Ann, bearing an Hommage à Messiaen dedication, rings with the birdsongs evoked in the poem.
