E-Mail This Article to a Friend Apocalypse when? Thomas Adès and the music of violence BY DAVID WEININGER

In 1999, Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic commissioned six "Messages for the Millennium," new works that the conductor hoped would "reflect the hopes and dreams we all have as we enter the next century." Most of the resulting works observed the level of dignity appropriate to such a solemn, if contrived, occasion. But Masur must have been shocked by America: A Prophecy, the entry he received from the young British composer Thomas Adès.

Asked to look toward the future, Adès turned instead to the past, fixing his vibrant imagination on the Spanish conquest of the Mayan civilization in the 16th century. What he came up with was one of the most frightening stretches of music since Shostakovich depicted Stalin’s fury in his Tenth Symphony. But hearing the piece now — EMI recently released the world premiere recording, with Adès conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra — is to realize that it has taken on a context very different from, and more ominous than, the one the composer intended.

America: A Prophecy begins with a simple three-note motive in the winds that hovers around F. Thumping chords and ghostly string harmonics intrude, obscuring the jaunty opening music. The colliding strands of music grow more disparate and then disappear, leaving only the a mezzo-soprano singing "O" in a voice as pure and vibrato-free as a child’s.

Adès took the text that follows from the books of the Mayan "chilam balams" ("jaguar priests"), which foretold the impending downfall of their world with uncanny accuracy. "O my nation/Prepare" the singer intones. Against a spare background of winds, she offers grim visions: "The people move as if in dreams/They are weak from fuck and drink/The prophets and the priests are blind. . . . It is the end of all our ways."

The music intensifies as the Mayan prophecy accumulates gruesome detail. "They will come from the east/Their god stands on a pole/They will burn all the land/They will burn all the sky." Brass fanfares of a Spanish nature erupt; a chorus salutes the holy war’s soldiers, who are to receive their due in Heaven. As this triumphal music collapses, the mezzo foresees that the enemy will rule "from the backs of your fallen."

The second part of America opens with more unsettled harmonics. The mezzo repeats "On earth, we shall burn" to a melody of almost childish naïveté. It is the upbeat for a thick, black mass of sound that seems to come out of nowhere, rising out of the low brass and pierced by shrill, insistent piccolos. "But know this well," the jaguar priests remind us as it subsides, "ash feels no pain." A few ambiguous chords usher in the chorus’s final pronouncement: "This is the victory by which our faith conquers the world."

No question that Adès, writing before September 11, meant to say something about American imperialism and its destructive capacity. But it’s no longer possible to hear America in so simple a way, because it’s no longer possible to listen to the piece without hearing resonances of September 11. It isn’t that the two sets of horrific events are congruent with each other; it’s that the music’s overall character and the texts’ mixture of violence and religious conviction make the association inevitable.

The idea of a "September 11 piece" is apt to strike many as either tactless or impossible (though John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls was well regarded in some quarters). America succeeds in part because it was never intended to be that. What’s more, Adès is as skilled and original an orchestral composer as any alive today. He causes the different sections of the orchestra to clash and harmonize in arresting ways. His vocal melodies (beautifully rendered here by mezzo Susan Bickley) are difficult but apt.

EMI’s generous CD includes a wide range of Adès’s music, from organ works to a hilarious adaptation of Madness’s classic "Cardiac Arrest." But along with his other major orchestral work, Asyla, it’s America: A Prophecy that shows him to be ruthlessly proficient at portraying our darker natures. Already at the age of 33, he’s proved a master of the musical language of violence.