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Turnage: Twice Through the Heart, Hidden Love Song, The Torn Fields
“The Torn Fields, pockmarked with pain and bitterness, triumphantly showcases Gerald Finley's chameleonic way with emotions” The Times
Composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage
Conductor: Marin Alsop
Performers:
· Gerald Finley (baritone)
· Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano)
· Martin Robertson (soprano saxophone)
· London Philharmonic Orchestra
Recorded: All are premiere recordings
· Twice Through the Heart, Blackheath Concert Halls, 16 April 2007
· Hidden Love Song, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 30 January 2006
· The Torn Fields, Watford Town Hall, 11 February 2007
Released: February 2008
Number of Discs: 1
Label: London Philharmonic
ASIN:
Human relationships have long fascinated Mark-Anthony Turnage. The three works on this new CD offer strikingly different glimpses of the human interface: a chilling first-person account of marital murder, a touchingly titled musical gift with soprano saxophone solo, and an acerbic view of the destruction of war.
Listen to exclusive previews of these works by clicking the LPO webpage below
http://www.lpo.org.uk/newseason/turnage/cds.html
Click here for details of the World premiere performance of The Torn Fields, Berlin, 2002
From Presto website
This latest release documents premiere recordings of works by Mark-Anthony Turnage, the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer in Residence. Ten years after its 1st performance at the Aldeburgh Festival, Marin Alsop conducts a studio performance of Turnage’s remarkable work for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble, Twice Through the Heart. The piece is a collaboration with poet Jackie Kay and explores the real-life story of an abused woman imprisoned for the murder of her husband. The music is lyrical but abrupt, painful but often quiet and re‑ective; one of the composer’s most nely crafted, intensely moving and technically accomplished works. ‘It’s almost made for Sarah’s [Connolly] voice’, says Turnage, ‘she gets very close to the heart of it’. The Torn Fields was also recorded in the studio, and is sung by baritone Gerald Finley, for whom Turnage wrote the work in 2000-02. This often nightmarish, vivid glimpse of the destruction of war using poetry from 1914-1918 is another example of the composer’s extraordinary ability to create vocal lines that embody their texts. Turnage has himself commented on the huge challenges he experiences when writing vocal music, but concedes that ‘writing for Gerald Finley makes it easier…he is, in my view, one of the greatest baritones around’. Sandwiched between these works is a recording made live at the world première of Turnage’s Hidden Love Song in January 2006. The soloist, Martin Robertson, is another close friend and regular collaborator with Turnage, and this performance reveals the sensitive, delicate nature of Turnage’s musical gift to his wife Gabriella Swallow.
What the critics say
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 2 February 2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d9eda38-d132-11dc-953a-0000779fd2ac.html
Rating: Four stars ****
These live recordings, released to coincide with the latest LPO concert series spotlighting Turnage's music, showcase three of his most emotive pieces - two of them with solo voice, the medium he says he has always found most difficult to write for. You would never know it from Twice Through the Heart , the tale of a woman who has stabbed her husband after years of emotional and physical abuse. It's a devastatingly beautiful monodrama that recalls, with the sparest and most sensitive of instrumental accompaniments, Berg (Wozzeck) and Britten as well as the blues. Connolly, the mezzo soloist, prefers to sing rather than emote, and the result ennobles a work that surely ranks as one of Turnage's masterpieces.
The Torn Fields , a setting of first world war poetry for baritone (the excellent Gerald Finley) and small ensemble, is subtler, moodier - thanks more to Turnage's eerily atmospheric instrumental lines than to the slightly bland vocal part. Between these two song cycles comes Martin Robertson's performance of Hidden Love Song , a concertino for soprano saxophone and orchestra that is part lullaby, part rhapsody with darker undertones. The LPO under Marin Alsop provides strongly characterised accompaniments for all three pieces.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 8 February 2008
Rating: Four out of five stars
You know where you are with Mark-Anthony Turnage. Not for this composer those abstract head-scratchers with titles such as Acrostic V. Instead he composes Blood on the Floor, or, on this splendid CD from the London Philharmonic Orchestra's label, Twice Through the Heart: a “dramatic scena” inspired by the story of an abused wife imprisoned for stabbing her husband after she refused to testify against him. Before the piece is a few bars old, Sarah Connolly - most urgent of British mezzo-sopranos - has hurtled out the word “garrotte”. Around the corner is “rolling pin” and “steak knife”. In this 1997 piece, Jackie Kay's text doesn't mince words, just as Turnage doesn't mince notes. Who said contemporary music was beyond direct communication?
All three pieces on the disc are first recordings. Only Hidden Love Song, a lightly reflective billet-doux of 2006 to Turnage's fiancée (now his wife), is captured in concert, complete with applause. But thanks to Marin Alsop, the LPO, and Turnage's convulsive art, the crackle of live excitement is just as strong in the studio performances of Twice Through the Heart and the war song cycle The Torn Fields, a powerfully eloquent assemblage of First World War poems, written in the wake of Turnage's opera The Silver Tassie.
After three years working with Turnage, their composer in residence, the LPO speak his language brilliantly: listen especially in The Torn Fields to the molten sound of the winds and brass. And Alsop's commitment is total, whether she's conjuring the composer's urban whoops, battlefield desolation or percussive tinkling in Hidden Love Song, suggesting the sounds of a clock.
Track by track, you can easily tell why singers and instrumentalists alike relish Turnage's music. Nothing is dead or dusty. And the composer knows his artists' gifts. The awful clarity of Twice Through the Heart is ideal for Connolly's dramatic flair. The Torn Fields, pockmarked with pain and bitterness, triumphantly showcases Gerald Finley's chameleonic way with emotions. And Martin Robertson's soprano saxophone has its day in Hidden Love Song, relaxed and tenderly expressive.
These works so vividly performed are among the best in Turnage's recent output. Listen with relish.