Review: Tom Mooney
Speranza/From the Wreckage is a great achievement by Mark Anthony-Turnage, and what segues both is the feel of optimism in the composition, an optimism that evolves rather than is revealed, and yet doesn’t diminish the convoluted set of origins, convoluted in the sense that the foul rag and bone shop of the heart (Yeats) that Turnage plucks from, is primarily European, but not confined to a single time span.
In the hands of Daniel Harding, From the Wreckage is a fifteen minute cloud burst, diverse and brilliantly creative, with the three solos sequences – flugelhorn, trumpet and piccolo trumpet – reprised by the musician for whom the piece was written, and premiered by, Hakan Hardenberger: as written, Hardenberger must move from the lower pitch to the higher, from dark to light, culminating in the stirring piccolo trumpet.
From the Wreckage also alludes to Turnage’s love of jazz influenced syncopations, and eases the passage of the three divisional movement by not making the orchestra an adversary of Hardenberger.
Sperenza is considered Turnage’s most ambitious and symphonic composition for orchestra, a monument ironically to the power of optimism in a bleak world, and the origin of the four movements, each called Hope, written in Arabic, German, Hebrew and Galeic, attests to the composer’s love of poetry, and you could argue that Sperenza, with each passage almost of equal length, is an extension of the belief by one of his favourite writers, Paul Celan, that art is often the only means through which despair can be filtered, and understood.
The literary seeds – Sperenza, Oscar Wild’s mother who spent part of her childhood in Wexford, Celan and Primo Levi (both of whom addressed the Holocaust in their work) and Sadegh Hedayat – are scattered throughout, writers who had had deep personal experience of inhumanity. Sadegh Hedayat’s writings were banned or censored in the Muslim world, and the notion of the artist in exile grappling with his demons would have appealed to Turnage.
What admirers of the composer love about his work is his willingness to widen his boundaries, his manifest interest in other musical idioms and cultures, and so we have a Palestinian anthem in Amal, a kids’ song from Israel in the second movement, with a duduk taking the lead, and there is a Jewish folk song in Tikvah.
Listening to Sperenza and specifically the memorable motifs, the sheer flowering of hope, one wonders if Turnage is familiar with the Irish word Duchas, a cousin of Dochas, which gives the nod to nature over nurture, or positive essence, such as the overall feeling you get from listening to this composition: a sense of place.
