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Turnage: Torn Fields [World Premiere]

17 September 2002

Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal, Berlin

Gerald Finley

Simon Rattle

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

The Dave Holland Quintet

Mark-Anthony Turnage:

 

A CD featuring the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, and with Gerry singing "The Torn Fields", will be released on the LPO label in early 2008.

 

 

From the BCMG website

http://www.bcmg.org.uk/default.php?id=478

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group commissioned this song cycle for baritone and large ensemble, and gave the first performance at the Berliner Festspiele in September 2002. Most appropriately, the soloist was Gerald Finley, who in the role of the opera’s tragic hero, Harry Heegan, had won resounding plaudits at the London Coliseum two years previously.

A prologue of wind and brass fanfares introduces a brief, mordant text by Rudyard Kipling; not a war poet as such, but nonetheless a writer deeply traumatised by the death of his only son in action. Amid joyless phrases for bassoon, soprano saxophone and muted trumpet, the voice projects a mood of desolation that is deepened by the informality of quiet humming. In the second song, in contrast, to words by Isaac Rosenberg, an angry message is delivered against a background of harsh, staccato chords that build inexorably towards the ironical last line. Rosenberg was killed at Arras in April 1918, six months before Wilfred Owen; his poem Wounded is the narrative of a soldier who, like Heegan himself, survives the war but, severely maimed, experiences physical and emotional rejection. Such is its fury that only the purely instrumental outburst of the following Interlude, marked ‘Manic’, can offer sufficient release. Stability is restored, however, before the ghostly tread of The Mouthless Dead, from Marlborough and Other Poems by Charles Sorley, killed in 1915 at the battle of Loos, tells a very different wartime story.

In the final song, the music of the prologue returns as accompaniment to one of the greatest of all war poems, Everyone Sang, which was invoked by Tippett at the conclusion of The Mask of Time. Here, it is likewise present as a symbol of humanity and hope, a transcendent concluding vision above and beyond the immediate horrors of the torn fields that are its context.

 

What the critics say

Nick Kimberley for the Independent, 27 September 2002

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article178189.ece

Is this a British invasion? Barely a week after Simon Rattle took over at the Berlin Philharmonic, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) arrived, keen to show Berliners that, post-Rattle, musical life in Birmingham retains its vigour.

Indeed, BCMG delayed its performance in the Philharmonie's Kammermusiksaal, so that Rattle could attend after rehearsing the Berlin Phil next door. The composer he was rehearsing? Mark-Anthony Turnage. And the composer BCMG was performing? Turnage again.

BCMG presented two Turnage pieces, the first a world premiere. Torn Fields sets Great War poetry, including "Wounded" by Wilfred Owen, which presages Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie. That in turn became Turnage's most recent opera, and Torn Fields occupies the same territory, in terms of subject matter, instrumental colouring and vocal timbre: Turnage wrote the cycle for Gerald Finley, who took the main role in The Silver Tassie.

Freed of operatic conventions, Turnage here finds a more natural vocal expression, which generates greater instrumental freedom. Of the seven movements, two are purely instrumental, including the Prologue, a plaintive wind chorale led by flute and oboe, underpinned by sax and clarinet. Sombre but never dull, these are Turnage's natural colours.

For the first song, a setting of Kipling's "Loss", a solo bassoon seems to drag the voice up from its depths; at first, words won't come, and Finley simply hums. Then, prompted by the bass clarinet, his dark, ominous baritone finds what it is he wants to say: "My son was killed laughing at some jest."

Throughout, Turnage triggers emotional responses without the musical exaggeration that such lines invite. The creeping figure for bowed bass that opens "Wounded" expands as it passes to the cello; then horns call as if across a vast chasm. Finley drained the colour from his voice to describe the wounded man, shivering "in his ghastly suit of grey".

Turnage is ever more assured in the effects he achieves. The only false moment in the cycle's 25 minutes came in this song; when he briefly pushed Finley into falsetto, it sounded uncomfortable, manipulative. Otherwise Torn Fields proved a richly moving experience.

Then came Bass Inventions, Turnage's concerto for the jazz bassist Dave Holland. Working with jazz soloists, here and in Blood on the Floor (the piece Rattle was rehearsing with the Berlin Phil), has expanded Turnage's range. While he never sounds merely imitative, there is no clear division between what he writes for Holland, and what Holland improvises. Holland's playing is so limber that it demands precise but flexible rhythmic articulation from the players. Under Alexander Briger, BCMG relished the challenge.

After the interval, Holland's own quintet played. The players' ability is undoubtable, but the traditional structure of opening statement/ solos/reprise was restrictive; while Billy Kilson's hyperactive drumming eventually proved enervating.

 

Shirley Apthorp, FT.com, 9 October 2002

http://search.ft.com/nonFtArticle?id=021009008052

The unchanging sorrows of war [extract]

…War seems a popular topic in Germany's music world at present. Mark-Anthony Turnage's chamber piece The Torn Fields was given its world premiere a few days later by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in the chamber-music hall of Berlin's Philharmonie. Like Britten before him, Turnage has set Wilfred Owen to music, along with poems by Rudyard Kipling, Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Sorley and Siegfried Sassoon. In fact, The Torn Fields seems to owe a great deal to Britten, from its lean, pictorial instrumentation to its dry baritone setting of the texts. Only in the prologue and interlude do we hear a little of the feral jazz tang that so often colours Turnage's music. Even in this clean, lyrical performance (Alexander Briger conducting, Gerald Finley singing, Dave Holland on bass), it was hard to see why Turnage favoured nostalgia and restraint above originality. The piece is eminently singable and written with a keen sense of instrumental colour; Turnage has an acute sense of the spaces between the notes, and the silences speak volumes. But is there really nothing new to say about war since 1961? Despite the vast forces that Britten employs, it's ultimately the intimacy of one man's death that speaks to us. Turnage, too, expresses collective horror on a personal level.