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Turnage: new song cycle on love at Wigmore Hall

(February 2009)

Tenor Mark Padmore and the Nash Ensemble give the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's new song-cycle, A Constant Obsession, at the Wigmore Hall in London on 5 March, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The work was commissioned by the Wigmore Hall for Mark Padmore and the Nash Ensemble, and was composed in 2007. The Nash Ensemble has enjoyed a long working relationship with Turnage, having commissioned and premiered numerous works and recorded his music on the NMC, Black Box and Onyx labels.

The 'constant obsession' of the title is love, and Turnage has selected five English writers from different periods who collectively chart love's course from its first anticipation, through realisation and setback, to love beyond the grave. Following a short prologue, the songs are Keats's Bright Star, Hardy's A Thunderstorm in Town (A Reminiscence), Edward Thomas's No one so much as you, Robert Graves's Counting the Beats and Tennyson's Come not, when I am dead which provides a closing threnody to the work as a whole.

Before the concert, at 6 pm, Anthony Burton interviews Mark-Anthony Turnage along with other British composers featured in the Nash Ensemble's programme.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov presents an all-Turnage concert on 18 April in Glasgow, including the world premiere of Five Views of a Mouth for flute and orchestra with Dietmar Wiesner as soloist, and the UK premiere of From All Sides (2005-06), first performed with choreography in Chicago.

Turnage is currently composing an opera commissioned by The Royal Opera in London, to a libretto by Richard Thomas on the theme of Anna Nicole Smith, due for premiere in 2011.

Photo: Philip Gatward

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