The British Composers series from EMI is treading warily as far as living composers are concerned; but now, within a year of the release of Nicholas Maw's majestic Odyssey (9/91), Simon Rattle and the CBSO return to the label in a quite different kind of music.
Mark-Anthony Turnage (b. 1960) belongs to a generation which can take expressionist complexity in its stride, and even see ways of linking it to English lyricism. The obvious danger is of watered-down expressionism, or of distorted lyricism. Yet Three Screaming Popes, inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, puts all such fears to flight, demonstrating that an innate eclecticism can still generate powerful and appealing music. There are particular echos of Birtwistle and Stravinsky, but Turnage displays a distinctive tone of voice, projecting quite simple melodic and rhythmic patterns through a weighty but never congested orchestral texture.
The single-movement structure disappoints only to the extent that at times it seems to promise more in the way of cumulative development than it actually delivers. The music itself is consistently characterful, however: the attention-grabbing title is relevant but not crudely so, and the wellprepared performance is recorded with admirable clarity and range of colour.'