It’s not often you see the Barbican foyer full of people wearing football shirts and scarves, but then I’m pretty sure the BBC Symphony Orchestra has never been involved in a premiere quite like this one, either. Mark-Anthony Turnage has been an ardent Arsenal supporter for more than 30 years, and even lived for a while within a pitch’s length of the old Highbury stadium, but until now he had never composed a tribute to his favourite club. Up for Grabs, which was introduced by the BBCSO conducted by Ryan Bancroft in a thrilling premiere, celebrates one of the most famous moments in Arsenal’s history, the evening in 1989 when they won the First Division title on goal difference, beating their closest rivals Liverpool 2-0 with virtually the last kick of the game at Anfield.
Turnage insists that his score can be a free-standing 25-minute orchestral piece in its own right. But Up for Grabs was designed to be played alongside a specially edited film of highlights of the Anfield game, which was how it was performed at the Barbican, with the capacity audience cheering and applauding every twist and turn in the game as if they were reliving what happened 32 years ago. The atmosphere was electric. In a platform discussion after the premiere, chaired by Amy Lawrence with three members of that winning Arsenal team, Lee Dixon, Alan Smith and Nigel Winterburn, as well as their manager George Graham, Turnage revealed that he had never enjoyed composing anything as much as Up for Grabs.
That enjoyment certainly comes through in his deliriously unbuttoned score, with its jazz trio – guitarist John Parricelli, drummer Peter Erskine and bass guitarist Laurence Cottle – driving things along. Arsenal football chants and songs provide thematic material, and the breathless, raw-edged intensity of it all sometimes harks back to Turnage’s music of the late 1980s and 90s. There are comic moments – a touch of Tom and Jerry when the film cuts to the Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish – but reflective lyricism, too: the whole work is dedicated to the memory of David Rocastle, a member of the winning team who died in 2001, and, when he appears in the film, an elegiac saxophone pays its tribute. But then the whole work encapsulates perfectly and unexpectedly just what great sporting occasions can be about.
Up for Grabs is available on BBC Sounds until 5 December.
