The Cheltenham Festival has always been a celebration of British music and since Michael Berkeley became its artistic director living composers have become a much more obvious component of the programming. This year Mark-Anthony Turnage is in residence; 10 of his pieces are dotted through the 16 days of concerts and the first of them, the European premiere of his latest orchestral work, Silent Cities, began Sunday evening's programme given by Paul Daniel and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Silent Cities was premiered seven months ago in Tokyo, but since then Turnage has revised the score, tightening it structurally. The title comes from Rudyard Kipling's description of the war graves of the Somme, and the genesis of the piece relates back to a visit the composer made to the first world war battlefields two years ago, whose haunted landscapes, he says, he has tried to evoke in the piece; it's dedicated to the memory of Sir Michael Tippett.
Yet there's a subtitle too - "Variants on a theme by John Scofield". Scofield is the jazz guitarist for whom Turnage conceived one of the solo parts in his evening-long Blood On The Floor, and whose music used in arrangements and it's the obsessive dotted rhythms of his highly chromatic theme that provides Silent Cities with its brooding sense of violence. A languid, bluesy melody (Turnage's own, and much more obviously jazz oriented than Scofield's) provides moments of repose, but they are invariably brushed aside, as the trajectory of the work tends some kind of cataclysmic explosion. After that has passed, in orchestral writing of huge virtuosity, all that remains are a few shards of material, and a bereft ending.
It's a challenging score for any orchestra, emotionally and technically, and a wonderful showpiece in which the BBC Philharmonic, on a rare excursion south from their Manchester home, acquitted themselves superbly, while Daniel unravelled the textures with a superb awareness of the work's dramatic potency.
His careful moulding of the enchanted accompaniments to Strauss's Four Last Songs around soprano Joan Rodger's equally careful pointing of the texts was a model of a very different kind, while in the first of Elgar's symphonies (all of which are being heard at Cheltenham this year) he stamped character and eloquence upon the performance from the very first bar.
