There was no more appropriate soloist for the British premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's song-cycle The Torn Fields than baritone Gerald Finley. Setting first world war poetry, the piece investigates the same themes of war and loss as his opera on Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie. Finley's performance as the lead character was the highlight of the opera; his performance of The Torn Fields was full of emotional and musical insight.
Turnage is inspired in his choice of poetry in Torn Fields - it is some of his most eloquent and effective word-setting, nowhere more so than in the central song on Wilfred Owen's poem Disabled. Telling the story of a soldier who is crippled by the war and who returns to be shunned by the society that once lionised him, Turnage dramatises Owen's imagery with a vivid palette of instrumental colours, especially in the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's performance with conductor Alexander Briger. There was the piquant, stabbing chord for Owen's leaps of purple blood, and a mocking memory of football chants and vanished heroism. Finley created a compelling psychological portrait in his performance, and made the whole set of five songs a bleakly moving experience. But there was optimism here, too: in the final song, setting Siegfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang, the strange, bird-like music of the instrumental prelude returned, blossoming into an image of fragile hope.
Philip Cashian's mercurial Three Pieces - a world premiere of a BCMG commission - followed Turnage's work with music that ranged from the precipitous trumpet solo that launched the fragmentary first piece, to the melancholy cello solo of the middle movement and the febrile, scurrying music of the final piece, The Traveller Without a Compass. Briger inspired the BCMG players to authoritative performances, even if the momentum of Cashian's music seemed diffuse rather than definite. But there was no doubting the single-minded propulsion of Franco Donatoni's Hot, with saxophonist John Harle: an explosion of riotous, unpredictable energy that connected cool jazz with high modernism.
