Mark-Anthony Turnage

Mark-anthony turnage Twice Through The hearT hidden Love Song | The Torn FieLdS Marin alSoP conductor SARAH CONNOLLY mezzo-soprano MARTIN ROBERTSon soprano saxophone GERALD FINLEY baritone LONDON PHILHARMONIC orCHESTRA Such is the immediacy of the names lifers [prisoners serving life sentences], and Mark-Anthony Turnage gives his works that felt great empathy with them, as well as an even a glance through his catalogue can attraction to the solitude”, Turnage said in provoke an emotional response. Many of his 1997. He was drawn to a BBC film of Kay’s titles generously reveal the content of the poetry, including Twice Through the Heart, piece they label, none more so than those on some years earlier. “This story struck me this disc: one, a literal description of the because the woman had refused to testify human act which gave birth to the piece; the against her husband. When Jackie and I tried next a touchingly disarming reference to the to make it into an opera, we realised that the work’s emotional tectonics; the third an image strength lay in the poetry, and so it became a that seems to encapsulate both the pace of ‘dramatic scena’, from the woman’s point of the work and the terror of its subject. This view.” The resulting drafts were nurtured by point-blank communication extends beyond the Contemporary Opera Studio at English titling to the works’ very thematic and musical National Opera, and the finished piece was fabric. “I pick strong emotional subject matter first performed on 13 June 1997 at the because it stimulates me”, says the composer Aldeburgh Festival by Sally Burgess and – those subject matters frequently include the members of the Orchestra of English National human effects of drug addiction, abuse, death Opera, conducted by Nicholas Kok. and war. Across nine sections in three sets of three, ‘the ‘There’s no way out, no way out.’ Turnage’s woman’ – originally named but subsequently mezzo-soprano launches into the taboo- stripped of an identity by Kay and Turnage to troubled subject matter of Twice Through the achieve ‘more distance’ – turns to contrasting Heart with a similar immediacy to that of the aspects of her predicament in a first person work’s title. The verse by Jackie Kay continues free-flow narrative style associated with in a straightforward non-poetic manner – conversational therapy; Kay describes it as the “everyday…almost banal” in Kay’s words. It woman’s ‘imagined voice’. Despite her ordeal, tells of a woman who stabbed her husband remnants of the woman’s love for her husband with a kitchen knife after suffering years of survive and are shot through the work in a emotional and physical abuse, subsequently strand almost more unnerving than the meeting Kay during education work in prison. obvious anger and fear, ‘the heart’ of the title Turnage and Kay were bound by similar can be seen as anatomical and emotional as experience working with prisoners: “I’d done the woman recalls both marital happiness and education work with prisoners, particularly her courtroom loyalty to her husband. Turnage’s music poses an emotional subtext some passages the music seems scarcely there to the woman’s speech. Like her, it’s rarely at all; every word as discernible and rhythmic violent or hysterical, but does reflect the as it would be in speech. claustrophobia of both her marital incarceration before the killing and her It might seem surprising, then, that Turnage is physical incarceration after it – opening with a particularly challenged by the prospect of stern cascade akin to the falling of a prison writing for voice: “I find it hard to write vocal portcullis, almost as an inversion of the rising music… but Gerald Finley is, in my view, the of a stage curtain. greatest baritone around. Writing for him made it easier.” So commented Turnage in Turnage commented in 1997 that writing the advance of the London première of the song piece was “more difficult than anything else cycle The Torn Fields by the Birmingham I’ve done”, but still Twice through the Heart is Contempory Music Group and Gerald Finley, one of the most remarkable creations of his conducted by Alexander Briger, on 6 October 30s – the period that gave birth to Blood on 2004 (the first performance, by the same the Floor and Scorched. His hallmarks are forces, took place two years earlier at the discernible: woodwind and brass sing out Berlin Festival). It was for Finley that Turnage bluesy pleas (though unusually there’s no part created the role of Harry Heegan in his First for saxophone), and there’s a lyricism that World War opera The Silver Tassie, of which recalls Alban Berg’s celebrated marital-murder this song cycle is a creative evacuee – the opera Wozzeck (as does the translucency of Wilfred Owen poem Wounded, set in the some of the instrumental writing, particularly fourth movement, was the template for the at the work’s conclusion). The predominantly original play. low instrumental textures are by turns thin like a prison mattress, broad and menacing, The Torn Fields feels immediately less and luscious and heartfelt. Taunting themes impulsive than Twice Through the Heart. emerge and become familiar, whilst the purely Framed by enigmatic fanfares which suggest a instrumental passages offer something of the world of nightmarish incomprehensibility, the indulgent, poetic emotion that Kay’s text work sets five First World War poems that deliberately avoids. That text is utterly savagely attack the sweeping loss of war, embodied by Turnage’s vocal writing, which often spiked with acerbic, critical humour. underwent major revision during a series of Emerging from an oblique low-string fog, the workshops prior to performance. As a measure soloist is first heard in a lonely, bluesy hum of his sensitivity and embracing of the text, in doubled by bassoon; far from the elastic twang that launches Twice Through the Heart. Turnage became the London Philharmonic Moreover, Turnage’s instrumental landscape, Orchestra’s Composer in Residence in 2005, and though often angular and lyrical like that of Hidden Love Song, a brief ‘song’ for soprano Twice Through the Heart, embodies the saxophone and chamber orchestra including strange, alien world of indiscriminate killing harpsichord, was the first collaboration of the rather than the more ‘everyday’ concept of residency, commissioned by the Orchestra with one-off murder. Norwegian and German partners. The work was written with two artists in mind: to perform it, In conveying this landscape, Turnage calls on a frequent recipient of Turnage commissions larger instrumental forces, this time including and the composer’s good friend the soprano saxophone. Within the score he saxophonist Martin Robertson; and its conjures episodes of vivid, explicit drama from dedicatee, Turnage’s then fiancée and now wife, the ensemble, including the galloping the musician Gabriella Swallow. The piece instrumental advances that corner the soloist creates a theme from the usable letters in her in No More Jokes, and the pale jazz dances (on name (G-A-B-E-A-S-A, with S representing E flat muted, vibrato-less strings and celeste) and in the German system of notation) which is derelict fanfares that recall ‘the old times’ lost heard at the work’s opening, recurring in the by the maimed survivor of Owen’s Disabled. melody line that emerges later. The melancholy But the texts dominate still, even if the musical of the other featured works isn’t entirely lyricism is perhaps more marked in a response eschewed despite the nature of the piece – that to that of the poetic phrase. Atop the lurching itself is a Turnage hallmark – and the piece is ‘pale battalions’ of mouthless dead which troll more a lullaby than a rhapsody, in which the across Turnage’s setting of Charles Sorley’s saxophone is joined occasionally by the cello, verse, the sore truths of the text are left gaping Gabriella’s instrument, in a touching gesture of and obvious, with only touches of ironic anger understanding rather than an embrace. from the woodwind. In the final movement, Alongside his writing for voice, Turnage’s music the baritone’s lyricism transcends the melee in for woodwind has a natural sensitivity to it; the manner of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, the here the expression of love through purely instruments try to join him, attempting to abstracted musical means seems an appropriate spiral heavenward with major-key inflections gesture – sentiments coming exclusively from as far as the implications of the returning the composer himself, whose frankness sees opening fanfare will allow, but seeming not them not so hidden after all. quite to reach the haven found by the ‘prisoned birds in freedom’ of the vocal line. Andrew Mellor, 2007 Twice Through the heart PART 1 1. no way out There’s no way out, no way out, He ties the kitchen towel into a garrotte, There’s no way out, no way out. He hits me with a rolling pin. There’s no way out, no way out. I notice a steak knife missing, There’s no way out, no way out. We’re too old for this, I shout. There’s no way out, no way out. He just keeps on and on about, There’s no way out, no way out. He’s always on about how I am in the wrong, He’ll sort me out, sort me out. He walks towards me. Lout. I pick up a knife to protect myself, There’s no way out, no way out. He keeps on walking towards me. There’s no way out, no way out. The knife is smiling.

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