We’ve had a whiff of Thomas Adès’s ballet score Dante in Gramophone’s pages before. Last year I reviewed a performance of its first part, ‘Inferno’, conducted by Adès and broadcast by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (1/22). When I wrote of ‘a huge, writhing, scintillating piece stamped through with all the composer’s signature systematic flair and metric gameplay’, I confess I hadn’t grasped that what I’d heard was merely Part 1 of three (blame my rudimentary Finnish). Here we have the whole Divine Comedy as an evening of music: a journey up from ‘Inferno’ to ‘Purgatorio’ and eventually ‘Paradiso’ as danced by the Royal Ballet in 2019 but played live here, without dance, by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

It’s a triptych occupying three distinct worlds, in which Adès is unsurprisingly at home in the Totentanz-like underworld of ‘Inferno’, channelling everyone from Sibelius (the cor anglais of his Ferryman) to Ravel (the mini-La valse of Paolo and Francesca), but with Liszt looming large as he uses the composer as a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’, borrowing character as well as material. It is physical, vivid and grotesque music from its jump-scare ‘abandon hope’ opening gambit and thrives on Adès’s technical wit (the missing beats of ‘The Deviants’ and all the outlandish orchestration).

The sound world changes for Part 2, ‘Purgatorio’, in which the pre-recorded sounds of a Jewish cantor and congregation (recorded at the Great Synagogue Ades in Jerusalem) set up a piece altogether more cleansing and solemn – particularly, as it winds its way up via wonderfully manic riffs on klezmer and liturgical music, towards ‘The Healing Fire’, ‘The Earthly Paradise’ and a final, rather more hollow ascent.

There is little of Adès at his best in ‘Purgatorio’, whose tableaux don’t tap his characteristic geometric architecture, the sort that powers ‘Paradiso’ – a kind of ‘music of the spheres’ possessed of its own structural and mechanical inevitability. Rather than ratcheting up to Paradise’s heights, this music appears to glide down on to a restful plateau with a sort of calm anticipation. Technically this is the sort of thing Adès does best, even if ‘Paradiso’ doesn’t possess the structural ingenuity of a piece such as In Seven Days (and also sounds extremely difficult to choreograph).

Nor am I convinced that the final appearance of a women’s chorus isn’t, creatively speaking, too easy a way out. Thus Dante feels like a strange bird on balance – and an audibly conservative one in relation to so much other music from this source – while there are passages in which the absence of the visual element absolutely makes itself felt on an audio recording, despite (or perhaps because of) the finesse of Dudamel’s dramatic pacing and the brilliance of the LA Phil. Does Dante, as The New York Times has posited, ‘belong with the great ballet scores of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky’? Nah. It feels more like another major theatre work from Adès that falls between the stools of the genres in which it wants to sit.