Back in the late 1990s, when Thomas Adès, as part of the New York Philharmonic’s ‘Messages to the Millennium’, was commissioned, the resulting reminder of the New World’s violent colonial past was received as a tactless slap by an arrogant ingrate. In a post-September 11 world, however, lines like ‘They will come from the east’ and ‘Their cities will fall’ make America: A Prophecy seem, well, prophetic.

But just as it is unwise to make summary dismissals on the basis of a first hearing, we shouldn’t assign too much greatness after the fact. Headlines aside, America remains as overwrought as it is underdeveloped. Its theme, originally a brutal depiction of the Spanish conquest of the Mayans, is so easily recontextualised because, frankly, there was little substance there to begin with. The promising facility of styles and sonorities evident in the composer’s début recording, ‘Life Story’ (EMI, 6/97), and the growing vibrancy of his orchestral imagination in Asyla result here in a one-dimensional portrait sounding like out-takes of other pieces rather than a fully conceived work.

The smaller targets, however, Adès hits with greater consistency. A set of choral works performed by Polyphony bubbles with judicious instrumental accompaniment. Both The Lover in Winter for countertenor and Life Story for soprano reveal the vocal potential later revealed in Powder Her Face. The most recent piece on the collection, Brahms, for baritone and orchestra, at least aims at the quirky humour in Alfred Brendel’s poem.

By contrast, it’s hard to see exactly what Adès’s arrangement of Cardiac Arrest adds to the original tune by the 1980s band Madness other than making a clever pairing with Couperin’s Les Baricades mistérieuses, also transcribed by Adès. Seeing those connections, however, we do gain a bit of insight into the composer’s musical mind.

To supporters and detractors, Adès is postmodernism incarnate – a brilliant, bitter voice dripping with ironic detachment. His work, though shows signs of its own decay. Familiar with all styles but beholden to none, Adès is the end of the line rather than the start of something new.