Andre Clements 

Turnage: On Opened Ground; Texan Tenebrae; Riffs and Refrains, etc – review

Mark-Anthony Turnage's fluency and imagination are on impressive show here, says Andrew Clements
  
  


This is the third disc the London Philharmonic's own label has devoted to Mark-Anthony Turnage, who was the orchestra's composer-in-residence from 2005 to 2010. All but one of these five performances from the Royal Festival Hall was a premiere of one kind or another, though only the violin concerto, Mambo, Blues and Tarantella, written for the fabulous Christian Tetzlaff, was a direct product of Turnage's tenure. The whole disc provides an impressive demonstration of Turnage's fluency and orchestral imagination, especially in the works with soloists here. On Opened Ground is a dark-hued, often anguished viola concerto, played with real intensity by Laurence Power, while Riffs and Refrains expertly puts solo clarinettist Michael Collins through his extrovert paces. There are also two short orchestral works: Texan Tenebrae is the interlude that provides the emotional pivot in Turnage's 2011 opera Anna Nicole, while Lullaby for Hans was an 80th-birthday tribute to his one-time mentor, Henze.

 

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