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Turnage: When I Awoke [World premiere]
8 December 2004
Royal Festival Hall, London
Gerald Finley
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski
Rachmaninov:
The Isle of the Dead, Op.29
Turnage:
When I Woke
Tchaikovsky:
Manfred – Symphony in B minor, Op. 58
What the critics say
Edward Seckerson for The independent, 14 December 2004
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article24612.ece
Four out of five stars
It's a paradox, but Vladimir Jurowski made Rachmaninov's The Isle of the Dead a place of irresistible allure. As ferryman of this compact masterpiece, he fought the Festival Hall acoustic and won. It was almost as if he created his own acoustic.
Such was the depth and penetration of the string bass-led undulations in the opening bars that we began to experience an imagined resonance, the ear compensating for what it couldn't hear. That's Jurowski's skill; his performances are so intensely well-heard, so concentrated, that they demand your involvement. There is no such thing as passive listening.
Midway through Rachmaninov's symphonic poem, a melody high in the first violins clears the texture, lightens the senses, illuminates the way ahead. Jurowski made it a truly transforming moment, as though mindful of the paradise concealed beyond the rocky inclines and tall conifers of the Arnold Bocklin painting that inspired the composer. The ensuing climaxes were almost lustful in response.
And death was only another boat-ride away in the belated world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's When I Spoke - three discreet settings of poems by Dylan Thomas. The baritone Gerald Finley is a voice alone in the first stanza of "Vision and Prayer", the potency of the words and strange elliptical beauty of the vocal line needing no adornment. Only when we reach the penultimate line, "To the burn and turn of time/ And the heart print of man/ Bows no baptism" does Turnage's modest chamber orchestra feel compelled to endorse the soloist. That's the skill of these settings - they are responsive to, but never compete with, Thomas's imagery.
In the second poem, where the poet is awakened by the sounds of a new day, Turnage has the voice come to with drowsy humming, arresting yet reassuring. Those same phrases induce sleep at the close of the poem with the words, "And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells". How else do you follow an image that strong, but without words? Then two violas and two cellos suggest the poet reclining on open sea - "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed" - while muted trumpets and pizzicato bass syncopations offer the merest hint of a Turnage "blues".
Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony contains sounds unlike anything else in his work; the stark, craggy, bassoon-led wind choruses of the first movement, for instance, where consolation is found in the unlikely voice of the bass clarinet.
Jurowski dug deep with these dark colorations, his strings weighing in heavily with the hero's main theme, his horns - bells raised - braying it defiantly in the coda. The whole reading had a distinctly Russian sensibility, in phrasing and articulation, too. The finale's bacchanal had everyone's blood pumping. It's all in the rhythm; never underestimate it.
Richard Whitehouse for classicalsource.com [extracts]
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=2265
Mark-Anthony Turnage is the London Philharmonic's Composer-in-Focus this season – the first piece to be heard being the Dylan Thomas song-cycle “When I Woke”, written in 2001 and only now receiving its first performance. In their forceful yet curiously distanced intensity, the three poems are typical of Thomas's late work (one can understand why Stravinsky was so keen to collaborate on an opera just prior to the poet's death), and Turnage has responded with settings understated yet plangent.
The diamond-like expansion and contraction of lines in “The Turn of Time” is treated as a vocal line of cumulative emotional power – unaccompanied until the fugitive postlude, whose crystalline clarity informs the setting of “When I Woke” that follows. This is the most diverse in terms of timbre and texture – its equivocal mood contrasting with the starkness of “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed” which forms the cycle's expressive culmination, and whose nocturnal imagery and blues inflections are Turnage hallmarks never so subtly deployed as here.
Indeed, the scoring – for a small though diverse orchestra – has an enviable focus, enabling the vocal line to project Thomas's complex word associations with absolute poise; something that Gerald Finley's fine-spun delivery was ideally equipped to handle. One of Turnage's most affecting recent works, it should not have been left unheard for so long and amply deserves further performances.
As to the remainder of the concert, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky seemed unlikely bedfellows – but their equally direct (if temperamentally very different) emotional fervency made a not inappropriate contrast, and with Vladimir Jurowski at the helm, interpretative conviction was sure to be forthcoming. Not entirely, perhaps, in The Isle of the Dead: the opening section lacked a degree of inexorability to draw one wholly into its orbit, with the baleful strivings touched off by the “Dies Irae” calculated almost to a fault. Formally, however, the performance was unexceptionally fine – and a similar conviction was evident after the interval.
Tom Service for The Guardian, 10 December 2004
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1370580,00.html
Three out of Five stars
Mark-Anthony Turnage's miniature orchestral song cycle When I Woke has taken a long time to wake up. Written in 2001, it has had to wait three years for its first performance, by baritone Gerald Finley and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski.
There were some striking moments in the piece: a haunting trumpet duet that framed the last of the three songs, all of which set poems by Dylan Thomas, and the chiming, harp-coloured chord that opened the somnolent second movement.
Finley is one of Turnage's closest collaborators, and When I Woke made the most of his prodigious talent. The first song was entirely unaccompanied, sung by Finley with evocative lyricism. His performance of the very end of the piece was mesmerising, an ethereal note that cast a spell over the Festival Hall audience.
However, without Finley's interpretation, Turnage's music was thin and lacklustre. Thomas's poems create a world of disturbing imagery, of "sea sound flowing like blood", but Turnage's musical response is insipid by comparison, with its watered-down harmonies and glib orchestral effects. It is music that washes away the subtlety of the poetry, failing to capture the unsettling atmosphere of Thomas's words.
By contrast, Rachmaninov's depiction of a forbidding sea in his symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead was brilliantly conjured by Jurowski and the LPO players. The limping, lapping rhythm at the opening of the work developed into an obsessive tread that led inexorably to Rachmaninov's gloomy conclusion: the victory of death, symbolised by the lugubrious Dies Irae chant. Jurowski made the piece glow with soft colours, especially in the brief vision of lyricism and life at the centre of the work.
In Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, another masterpiece of Russian musical tragedy, Jurowski controlled the music's dazzling drama with total assurance. The first movement had an ominous power, and the Scherzo glittered with otherworldly energy. Most striking of all was the shocking, chorale-like music of the coda to the last movement, as if the work's anti-hero had at last found redemption.
From Seen and Heard
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2004/May-Aug04/jurowski812.htm
What is possibly Rachmaninov’s darkest score set the scene for a programme of intense emotion; by his own admission, Mark-Anthony Turnage is attracted to the ominous side of life, and his magnificent settings of Dylan Thomas poetry proved an easy partner for Tchaikovsky’s under-appreciated ‘Manfred’ symphony.
A batonless Jurowski seemed to be moulding the irregular five-rhythms of the Isle of the Dead out of some sort of clay, inspiring the LPO to play with a sense of the massive that is the key to this score. Rachmaninov’s contrasts were given full meaning in the course of an overarching, tremendous sense of unstoppable momentum. This is one of this composer’s most tightly structured scores, and here it sounded one of his best.
Astonishingly, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s When I Woke was receiving its World Premiere, despite having been produced in 2001 for the Credit Suisse International Concert Series (Turnage was a bit evasive as to exactly why in the pre-concert talk). Whatever the case it was a privilege to be present on this occasion, especially when the soloist came in the shape of Gerald Finley. Turnage praised Finley’s ‘rich, resonant’ voice in the pre-concert event, and so it proved. No less impressive was the way the Thomas texts obviously resonated with Turnage and inspired him to a work of no mean import.
The reproduction of these texts in the programme helped, particularly in the case of the first, 'The Turn of Time', with its diamond-text shape that Turnage works initially with and later irons out somewhat. Finley was left alone to vocalise most of the text of this song (amazingly focussed and confident,) until the small orchestra injects whooping horn figures.
The second movement, a setting of ‘When I woke’ begins with seemingly improvised and (in this performance) well-projected humming from the soloist, under-laid by a quiet, subtly scored orchestral tapestry. There is an easy compositional fluency to this that is appealing on a very immediate level, especially when every word carried so well (‘The erected’ for example, the two words nice and distinct).
For darkness, the opening of the third song, 'Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed' takes some beating. The sheer hypnotic, desolate delicacy of the scoring (voice accompanied by pairs of violas then ‘cellos) and a predominance of hyper-delicate greys on orchestral colourings made for a vast sense of desolation. Lines here, as elsewhere, were supremely singable, whatever the angularity. A mere fifteen minutes in total duration, When I Woke is major Turnage.
Tchaikovsky’s Manfred sits in orbit to the approved canon of six, circling them seemingly forever without ever being let in. In a committed performance, and this was certainly that – one just sits there and wonders at this neglect. Jurowski’s clear but expressive beat and gestures coaxed playing from the LPO that was little short of magnificent. A sea of strings gave its all to Tchaikovsky’s Byron-inspired outpourings; in addition, Tchaikovsky’s moments of supplication carried real emotional impact.
The difficult Scherzo acted as a reminder of the LPO’s virtuosity, with gossamer wind. The Trio did not hang about, but Jurowski managed to contrive an impressively shaped climax. Similarly he made the most of the ‘Manfred-theme’ interruption in the slow movement. Most impressive of all perhaps was the final resumption of bucolic activity towards the end of the third movement that appeared as a veritable ray of light.
Gritty strings, an uncanny ability to make lines speak through dense textures plus a positively infernal fugue made the finale seem more together than it sometimes can seem, the blazing organ topping off the grand ending.
A superb concert that made me want to attend the Sunday concert (12th), which includes more Turnage (Evening Songs).
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 14 December 2004
If posterity smiles on Mark-Anthony Turnage, it should be because of When I Woke and Evening Songs.
As showcased in the London Philharmonic Orchestra's latest concerts under Vladimir Jurowski, both works came across as the most beautiful he has written, unfettered by debts to jazz and Britten.
Unlike many of this composer's other works, what we hear is Turnage himself, not a stylistic magpie picking up the mannerisms of those he reveres. In each concert, Turnage was set alongside Rakhmaninov and Tchaikovsky, an apt juxtaposition, underlining how he also thrives on good tunes.
When I Woke, a setting of texts by Dylan Thomas for baritone and chamber orchestra, was written three years ago for Bryn Terfel, who refused to sing it. It has taken until now to reschedule the premiere, and the only conclusion to draw from this heavenly performance by Gerald Finley is that Terfel made a huge misjudgement.
Turnage drapes the poet's heartbeat in sounds of rapt simplicity, creating an entirely new world in which the lilt and word-shapes of Thomas's verse can resonate. These are very musical, very tonal settings.
"The Turn of Time", unaccompanied until the last bars, has a naked, unvarnished appeal. "When I Woke" begins and ends with gentle humming, its evocation of Thomas's salty townscape as fragrant as Barber's Dover Beach -a comparison underlined by the spareness of Turnage's instrumentation. In Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed, nocturnal breathing and the gentle movement of water coexist in a shimmering soundscape of muted trumpets, double-stopped viola and lyrical oboe.
Evening Songs, from 1998, was apparently inspired by Turnage's infant sons, but the simple suggestiveness of the music belies its complexity, with an atmosphere ranging from urban languour to Mahlerian dreamworld.
Thanks to Jurowski's technical command, the LPO played with clarity and sophistication: this really is a marriage made in heaven. Their Rakhmaninov Isle of the Dead was mesmerising, their Tchaikovsky (Manfred Symphony on Wednesday, the Suite No 3 on Sunday) monumentally impressive. Jurowski may be reluctant to turn the screw of emotion in Tchaikovsky, the head still rules the heart, but the music is clearly in his blood.