Turnage reviews

Turnage reviews

Come To Me In My Dreams
: Works by Bridge, Britten, Holst, Howells, Ireland, Turnage, et al

Sarah Connolly, Joseph Middleton (Chandos)
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Turnage: Concerto for Two Violins & Orchestra (Shadow Walker); Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

Vadim Repin, Daniel Hope; Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra/Sascha Goetzel (Onyx)
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Albion Refracted

Piatti Quartet (Champs Hill Records)
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Turnage: From the Wreckage

Mark-Anthony Turnage has the courage to explore dark and painful emotions through his music, and to portray them with razor-edged intensity, with no searching for false consolation. But however modern his sound palette, he also has the courage to defy New Music orthodoxy and look to jazz improvisation, and even Romantic symphonic thinking, for a style that engages in direct, visceral terms. The sound world of Speranza (‘Hope’) is as contemporary as a virtual cityscape.

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Turnage: A Constant Obsession; Three for Two; Four Chants; A Slow Pavane; Grazioso!

Closing down options can be surprisingly liberating for a composer. Mark-Anthony Turnage has created some of the most luxurious orchestral canvasses in contemporary music, but it’s clear that his imagination also thrives when he’s limited to chamber forces.

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Turnage: Anna Nicole

Watching Anna Nicole gave me a strange sense of familiarity – not with Turnage’s Greek or The Silver Tassie, but librettist Richard Thomas’s more famous Jerry Springer: The Opera, a hip, heartless pastiche exploiting bizarre sexual situations set to operatic music. Thomas’s anti-heroine, whom he insists ‘belongs in opera’, was a Middle American stripper whose ancient billionaire husband’s death abandoned her to a decade of litigation over his estate, eccentric media antics and the loss of her son and finally her own life to drug addiction.

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Milo: Bridge, Turnage & Britten

This album is woven with intimate relationships: Milo, after whom it is named, is Mark-Anthony Turnage’s youngest son and godson of Guy Johnston; its plaintive, artless air  was written for his christening.

Bridge was, of course, Britten’s ‘musical’ father and their two cello sonatas make a fascinating comparison. Johnston has also included Turnage’s Sleep On, three soulful lullabies for cello and piano.

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Turnage: Twice Through the Heart; The Torn Fields; Hidden Love Song

Mark-Anthony Turnage is one of the few living composers who has a melodic style which manages to be edgily contemporary and elegant at the same time. In Hidden Love Song the soprano saxophone’s lyricism has that slightly acrid urban feel that typifies so much of Turnage’s best work, and yet it also has a natural shapeliness, and it’s full of phrases that lodge in the memory. There are similar moments in Twice Through the Heart, a setting of genuinely unsettling poems by Jackie Kay about a bullied and physically abused wife.
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Eotvos, Gruber, Turnage

For the Baroque the trumpet could be relied on to add a dash of jubilant optimism. By the 20th century, whether in the timeless ritual of Ives’s Unanswered Question or the cityscape of Copland’s Quiet City, the confidence is gone. And jazz has lent a new persona and vocabulary.
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Turnage: Blood on the Floor

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Blood on the Floor takes its title from a desolate Francis Bacon painting. What gave it a more personal edge was the drugs-related death of Turnage’s brother. But you don’t need to know any of this to catch the mood of urban violence, loneliness and despair, or to be moved by the way lyricism emerges through the brittle thickets of jazz-inflected modernism and almost – but not quite – triumphs over it. In the DVD’s introductory feature, Turnage describes himself memorably as a ‘neurotic humanist’.
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TurnageBenjaminRihm

George Benjamin’s suave and tubby

Olicantus, a 50th birthday tribute

to Oliver Knussen, is here mere

icing on an already stimulating issue

that contrasts Rihm, the leading

German Romantic modernist, with

Mark-Anthony Turnage, who begins

to seem a kind of post-modern

Romantic. Certainly the three works

that make up Etudes and Elegies

establish fairly clear connections

to genres, and indeed sonorities,

cultivated by Michael Tippett. If

A Quick Blast for wind, brass and
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Turnage: Fractured Lines; Another Set To; Silent Cities; Four-horned Fandango

This is stunning – and strongly recommended both to enthusiasts and new-music-phobics. Although Mark-Anthony Turnage is no soft-centred populist (he can be almost as hard-edged and acerbic as Birtwistle), there is still a warm core to the nervous, brittle, sometimes garish brilliance. It emerges in extraordinarily compelling lyricism – angular, but with the gritty, sensuous immediacy of the jazz giants Turnage reveres.
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Turnage: On All Fours; Lament for a Hanging Man; Sarabande; Release

NMC’s new disc of chamber music by Mark Anthony Turnage is not ‘easy listening’. But Turnage has never written to please. His music is powerful, expressive, raw, uncomfortable, always with a hint of underlying violence and rebellion. The four works on the disc all date from the Eighties and to an extent show their age – hard-edged, complex and dissonant. Turnage’s music is strongly coloured, particularly favouring vast arrays of percussion and the ‘vulgar’ sound of the saxophone – a gatecrasher in ‘normal’ classical surroundings.
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Turnage: Your Rockaby; Night Dances; Dispelling the Fears

Argo has made a long-term commitment to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and the first fruit of their collaboration combines two of his works from the last couple of years with the piece that first brought him to prominence 15 years ago. Night Dances won the Guinness Prize for Composition when Turnage was only 21, yet the music is already identifiably his – a suite for four soloists and chamber orchestra coloured with the rhythmic and harmonic inflections of jazz and funk, which has the immediacy and pungency that have remained part of his music ever since.
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Turnage: Drowned Out; Kai; Three Screaming Popes; Momentum

The Lad from Essex’s titles (Beating about the Bush, Gross Intrusion) often promised sex and violence; but the earlier works, especially, were disappointingly well-behaved. Even Greek – the opera based on Steven Berkoff’s play – was, I felt, more notable for its lurid libretto and staging than its music.
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Turnage: Greek

Mark Anthony Turnage’s opera after Steven Berkoff’s eponymous play is a grim, unsettling monument to the yobocracy of the Thatcher Years in Britain and, as such, may come to be regarded as a Zeitoper.
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Turnage: Some Days; Your Rockaby; Dispelling the Fears; Blood on the Floor

The Gilbert-less Sullivan collection is a mixed bag. There’s a poised account of Di ballo from Mackerras, and Royston Nash brings real style and panache to the overtures Macbeth and Marmion and the ballet music from Victoria and Merrie England. But why represent Pineapple Poll in an arrangement for wind band?
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Turnage: Two Memorials; An Invention on Solitude; Sleep On; Cortège for Chris; Tune for Toru; Two Elegies Framing a Shout; Three Farewells

Elegies, memorials, farewells, a cortège – as you’ll have guessed, there’s a melancholic, inward-looking tone to most of the music on this disc. We’re a long way from the gritty brilliance of the orchestral Three Screaming Popes or the opera Greek. But even though the voice is rarely raised in these finely crafted chamber miniatures, Turnage’s sweet-and-sour lyricism speaks as directly and seductively as in his finest orchestral works.
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Turnage: The Silver Tassie

In The Silver Tassie, Mark-Anthony Turnage drew on the lyrical beauty of The Country of the Blind and the terse, demotic delivery of Greek to create a conventional opera on a grand scale. Seeing the first performance at the London Coliseum, I felt at times the overburdened orchestral textures threatened to overwhelm its dark force.

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