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Mark-Anthony Turnage: The Torn Fields
31 May 2004
CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Gerald Finley
BCMG Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Alexander Briger, conductor
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 “Hear And Now” 28 August 2004
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.
Programme
Julian Anderson:
'Khorovod'
Mark-Anthony Turnage:
'The Torn Fields'
Philip Cashian:
'Three Pieces'
Franco Donatoni:
‘Hot’
What the critics say
David Murray, Financial Times, 2 June, 2004
Outside the capital, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is the nearest equivalent to the London Sinfonietta. Like it, the BCMG offers programmes of both premieres and repeat-performances of earlier successes, skilfully and sympathetically performed; almost any composer would be delighted to win the BCMG's attention. This week Alexander Briger conducted the group in the world premiere of Philip Cashian's Three Pieces and the belated British premiere of an important song cycle by Mark-Anthony Turnage, The Torn Fields, flanked fore and aft by an early Julian Anderson favourite, Khorovod, and a bright quasi-jazzy piece by the late Franco Donatoni.
The latter fizzed nicely. So did Khorovod, inspired by folk dances (mostly Slav). I've heard its complex rhythms more sharply articulated, but the spirit was cheerful and buoyant. The Torn Fields cycle, sung by Gerald Finley with his usual earnest eloquence, was more sombre, dating from just after Turnage's opera The Silver Tassie and sharing its bitter, elegiac mood: four poems by First World War poets, with an epitaph by Rudyard Kipling.
Even more than the opera, The Torn Fields often has a Britten-ish ring. The music is mostly stark: the second song begins with a grinding duo for double-basses, and then another for celli. Between that song and the next is a "Manic" interlude, fast and anxiously stuttering. The final song, after Siegfried Sassoon's "Everyone Sang", suggests bleak hope. Imposing, certainly; and another time, Finley will surely find greater lyrical conviction.
Cashian is always interesting and original, and he likes to write small: the first of the Three Pieces, "Scenes from Burgos", officially consists of 13 brief sections, closely knit and developed. "The Silver Surface of Night" is a nocturne for cello and vibraphones, far from conventional, and "The Traveller without a Compass" is a racing moto perpetuo. You couldn't identify Cashian as belonging to any "school"; the chief marks of his music are simply lucid concision, and an unorthodox way of combining instruments. I've never heard a Cashian piece that did not spring to individual, fetching life. More, please!
Ivan Hewett, the Telegraph, 3 June 2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/06/03/bmih03.xml
Sudden joy dispels dark clouds of war
There was just one moment of light relief in this concert - the high trill and twee cymbal clash that ended Philip Cashian's Three Pieces.
It was an amusingly incongruous follow-up to the previous dark-hued moto perpetuo that drew an audible laugh. But, otherwise, the evening was a fiercely high-intensity affair, as Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's concerts mostly are (to their great credit, it must be said).
Cashian's piece was one of two premières commissioned by local new music patrons under the BCMG's "Sound Investors" scheme, and the presence of these eager Maeceanases gave a peculiar intensity to the evening. (You can spot them in the audience holding a score of the piece, a comfortingly tangible evidence of their "investment" after the sounds have vanished into thin air.)
Cashian's piece was a deftly crafted three-movement work full of beguiling sounds, particularly in the drowsy cello-and-vibraphone central movement. But it was outweighed by the other new commission, a setting of First World War poetry for baritone and large ensemble by Mark-Anthony Turnage.
Turnage's music has been haunted by First World War imagery ever since his opera The Silver Tassie, and these new songs were wonderfully performed by Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone who brought the opera's hero Harry Heegan to such vivid life.
The five poems and one bitter couplet from Rudyard Kipling made a subtle curve from anger, through bleak observation of one maimed victim, to a stark elegy, this last expressed through a hesitant tread of crepuscular harmonies, like some sad processional.
But Turnage's boldest stroke was the sudden turn to joy in the last movement, a setting of Siegfried Sassoon's heart-stopping Everyone Sang.
Contemporary music can strike many moods, more than it is normally given credit for. But the ecstasy of this poem is foreign to it, and Turnage wisely didn't try to soar up to its heights. Instead, he conjured a texture of hesitant aspiration, whose very inadequacy - compared with Sassoon's brimming ardour - was a mark of its emotional honesty.
The other two pieces had none of this emotional complication, but they were rewardingly strenuous in other ways.
Julian Anderson's Khorovod is a exuberant collage of folk dances, sometimes strung end-to-end, sometimes piled up in clashing counterpoint. It was played here with superb steely control.
As was the last piece, Hot, a marvellously witty deconstruction job on the idioms of jazz by Franco Donatoni, which ended the concert in blaze of raucous energy.
Anthony Holden, The Observer, 6 June 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1232228,00.html
…Turnage makes an eloquent case for new music with a song cycle of war poems
How often have I moaned about contemporary composers' lousy taste in poetry? Trust Mark-Anthony Turnage to prove me wrong. His song cycle the Torn Fields sets five angry war poems (by Kipling, Rosenberg, Owen, Sorley and Sassoon) in high elegiac style, with far more topical resonance than he could have anticipated when he wrote them two years ago; given its first performance in Berlin in 2002, the cycle has now received its belated UK premiere in Birmingham.
Like Stravinsky and Hindemith before him, Turnage proves ready to re-use ideas from his operatic output; these eloquent protest songs bear an obvious affinity to his Sean O'Casey opera, The Silver Tassie, as performed by the same Canadian tenor who took the lead in that powerful work, Gerald Finley. All the usual Turnage hallmarks are here: the muted, Miles Davis-ish crooning of a lone horn amid lugubrious swirlings of brass and wind, the occasional cameo for doleful double-basses and cellos amid the plangent vocal line.
His sombre setting of Wilfred Owen's poem 'Disabled' may be the heart of the cycle, but the hushed angst of Charles Sorley's 'When you See the Millions of Mouthless Dead' proves even more evocative. Echoes of Britten's War Requiem were, perhaps, only to be expected; but there is a Brittenesque air to the whole work, atypical of Turnage, for all the glum, brooding introspection common to both composers in middle age. Only an optimistic note at the end of the Sassoon reminds us that Turnage can occasionally muster a smile on his musical face.
Far more upbeat, if a less cohesive whole, was the other new work on offer from the exemplary players of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under the authoritative Alexander Briger: the world premiere of Philip Cashian's Three Pieces, inspired (apparently at random) by a Julian Rathbone novel, a Kathleen Raine poem and a Jean Dubuffet painting.
In stark contrast to the Turnage, Cashian's piece leaps into dizzying action with an eerily beautiful, sub-Stravinskian whirlwind of 13 short sections for separate groups of instruments entitled Scenes from Burgos. The Silver Surface of the Night is a shimmering if shapeless nocturne for solo cello and two vibraphones, The Traveller without a Compass a feverish Moto perpetuo for violins and marimbas. Without fusing into any kind of whole, the three pieces all display Cashian's trademark energy and dynamism, inventively playing with form and texture as if for no other reason than sheer exhilaration.
Book-ended by sprightly accounts of Julian Anderson's Khorovod and Franco Donatoni's Hot, these two new works by gifted British composers were both commissioned by BCMG's 'Sound Investment' scheme, via which musical punters can buy a 'sound unit' of £100 in the piece of their choice.
More than £100,000 has now been raised in this way, generating more than 40 new works over 12 years, and guaranteeing a full house of new-music enthusiasts come to hear if they've got their money's worth.
If it prompts more pieces like these, BCMG's enterprising idea is in grave danger of giving contemporary music a good name.