Dowland

Using Liszt as an extravagant model and further happily drawing from or transforming Ravel, Mussorgsky, Dowland and others, Adès revels in his own exceptional extravagance.

Purcell cleverly prefaces his Haydn, and Dowland his Schumann, and if his Brahms Fourth is misguided, his Beethoven Ninth is bracingly straightforward.

The rest is adaptation — an insistence on the elasticity of music, borne out with rich, organ-like sonorities in pieces like the Dowland or John Bennet’s “Weep, O Mine Eyes.”

“Flow My Tears,” it might be added, was based on yet another “Lachrimae,” one of Dowland’s best-known solo lute pieces, not part of this set.

In this sense, measuring time irreversibility might reflect how singular a particular composer’s style is—the difference, say, between the gaudy violinist Nicolo Paganini and the melancholy lutenist John Dowland.