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Turnage, Ravel, Prokofiev:  Benedetto Lupo (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski (conductor), Royal Festival Hall, London. 30.1.2008 (AO)


Three Turnage works are presented in Royal Festival Hall programmes over the next two weeks.  This was the first of two conducted by Vladimir Jurowski,  and in fact the LPO had premiered Turnage’s Evening Songs in 2004, and made the highly-regarded recording which followed.  This performance was if anything a more mature reading, showing how Jurowski and the orchestra have grown deeper into the piece. The programme was extremely well thought out, highlighting aspects of Turnage’s music and setting it into context.

Turnage uses a massive orchestra, large even by late Romantic standards, further augmented by non standard instruments like soprano saxophone and an unusually varied percussion section.  There’s potential there for massive, flashy impact, but Turnage, as usual, confounds the obvious.  Instead, Evening Songs is a study in atmospheric mood, meant to create an atmosphere of brooding opaqueness. Sleep, after all, is the theme that runs through the three sections. Hence the lugubrious orchestration, and the slow unfolding of developmental change. In many ways it’s a late night contemplation, more suited to the end of a programme than a beginning. Jazz, or rather the bluesy essence of jazz, though, is never far away with Turnage.  Jurowski understands this well, as he has a feel for the downbeat and strange subterranean flow of the work.  He also ensured that the solo passages, particularly for saxophone and violin, didn’t get lost amid the density of the orchestration.  The foghorn-like rumble that centres the third section, Still Sleeping, gradually lifts, revealing  a lighter, quite lyrical melody.

Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G was therefore an inspired choice to follow Turnage, for it reinforced the jazz imagery.  Ravel had recently returned from the United States before writing it  and this too,  is an impressionistic mood piece filled with images of America in the late 1920’s. Unlike Turnage, Ravel uses a fairly small orchestra, favouring rapid dynamics.  The textures could not be more different, yet Jurowski judgedthese well, too.  The exuberant dances at the beginning of the first section opened out to a more restrained clearing, as Lupo enters. The second section allowed Lupo to develop the more intimate, contemplative ideas that underpin the more flamboyant jazz imagery, capturing a nebulous, nostalgic mood – the blues without being overtly bluesy.  The Blues exists in different forms in most cultures  and here Ravel connects the jazz age to a deeper tradition. All elements pulled together beautifully in the final movement with its wry exuberance.

Given this emphasis on jazz, one would expect Jurowski to have continued with early Shostakovich, perhaps.  But he's also far too astute musically to choose the obvious. Instead, he takes Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and reveals that there’s a vein of wildness, half-submerged beneath the sober classicism.  Prokofiev also knew America, and jazz and by the time this symphony was written, he had discarded his American wife, who ended up in a Soviet gulag. There was no way Prokofiev could have written overtly modernist forms in those circumstances, so he used lively folk idioms  instead.  Jazz they aren’t, but they’re irreverent and free, in contrast to the formality of the symphony. There’s also a small detail in the third movement when something vaguely bluesy arises, to be quickly swept away in breezier, less complex folk rhythms.  It surfaces for barely a moment, but it’s there for a purpose.  The symphony may end in an outburst of showy confidence, but has Prokofiev really suppressed all traces of his alternative thinking?  It is sensitivity to details like this as part of the whole, which define the musical intelligence of a conductor and  yet again, Jurowski reveals the parallels with Turnage.  Prokofiev, writing in Soviet times, needed an unequivocal resolution to cast aside doubt.   Turnage, however, can leave his conclusions open-ended, allowing  his gentle melody to surface from dense textures and rise outwards.

Anne Ozorio

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