It was appropriate that the BBC's weekend of Mark-Anthony Turnage's music should climax with his first full orchestral work, Three Screaming Popes. Inspired by Francis Bacon's paintings, this piece launched Turner's career in 1989, when he was in his late 20s.
Leonard Slatkin's performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra revealed that many of Turnage's musical signatures, like his penchant for violent contrasts, attained a definitive form in this piece. The four gruesome shrieks that end the piece still sound shockingly vivid, both as a realisation of Bacon's screaming pontiffs and as a conclusion to the work's internal logic.
Yet that balance between musical and expressive content is not something Turnage finds consistently in his music, as the rest of Sunday's concerts demonstrated. Fractured Lines, a double percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie and Peter Erskine, was performed in a new version with Slatkin and the BBCSO. Every gesture is amplified to extremes, including the opening bass-drum exchanges and the hyperactive orchestral writing. But the most effective section is Erskine's cadenza, when, as if released from the constraints of the structure, he embarks on a genial drum solo. Otherwise, for all its superficial energy, there is little musical momentum to connect the moments of the piece.
Another recent piece for jazz soloist and ensemble, Bass Inventions, was performed by Dave Holland and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Alexander Briger. In other pieces, such as Blood on the Floor (reviewed yesterday), the combination of jazz with a classical ensemble releases both Turnage's musical imagination and the flair of the performers. But Bass Inventions sounds as if it hampers everyone involved. The music ambles languidly without actually getting anywhere, especially in the huge last movement, and neither the solo line nor the accompaniment develops a clear musical argument.
But when Turnage's combination of styles and influences comes together coherently, the results are striking and powerful. A new piece for the BBCSO Chorus, The Game Is Over, a setting of Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry, vividly captures the poem's intense imagery. Yet it was the BCMG's performances of Twice Through the Heart and Dark Crossing that impressed most. Twice Through the Heart tells a horrific story of domestic violence, setting poems by Jackie Kay for mezzo-soprano (here Stephanie Marshall) and ensemble. Turnage transforms musical symbols of intimacy - simple, hummable tunes - into emblems of love turning sour. He distorts them, mirroring the abuse experienced by the woman. In Dark Crossing, the rawness of his earlier idiom is replaced by a new lyricism and continuity, and the work's musical and emotional range embodies the richness and potential of Turnage's language.
