Mark-Anthony Turnage: reviews of Festen Suite at BBC Proms
The UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new Festen Suite at the BBC Proms garnered acclaim from press and public alike. The 25-minute orchestral work captures the opera’s party framework while darker undercurrents rise to the surface, with the music alternating between exuberance and blues-tinged elegy.
Following Festen’s highly successful stagings at The Royal Opera in London and Finnish National Opera, Mark-Anthony Turnage has created a new orchestral suite drawn from his award-winning opera. The Festen Suite was first heard in Copenhagen in February with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Alondra de la Parra and received its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in July with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. Musical America summed up the 25-minute suite as “music of compelling energy, brilliantly orchestrated.”
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> Information on Festen
"Eight short movements crystallise the extreme contrasts of the opera, from big-band bacchanalia to brooding melancholy."
Financial Times
"The festering atmosphere of Thomas Vinterberg’s film and its celebrated opera adaptation lingers in this vivid orchestration… It’s cleverly made and musically satisfying on its own terms, without the dramatic scaffolding of the opera. I think we’ll be hearing it a lot in the future.
“You can almost smell the stale wine and cigar smoke coming off the composer’s vividly orchestrated prelude, gurning with faux-jollity – literally beaten into it by percussion wallops that try to keep its lurching progress on track. Thereafter, the eight-movement suite ricochets between lyricism – the gentle melancholy of Blue or Green, pastoral tenderness in Grandma’s Song – and denial, slinky in the Conga with its rictus grin, sleazy in Interlude I. Then revelations break the surface in the jabbing thrusts of The Fight, string padding stripped away to allow brass and woodwind to land their punches cleanly.
The Guardian
“The third movement Conga is completely unexpected. Opening with a trombone glissando, it is a proper Latin knees-up with slinky brass punctuated by stabbing percussion in an adjacent key. If there was a single release this would be the A-side… It’s an enthralling new work, and one that deserves a future life in the concert hall.”
Musical America
The Swedish premiere of the Festen Suite follows on 12 March next year with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada and further stagings of the complete Festen are planned for future seasons. Turnage’s new guitar concerto for Sean Shibe, Caught Hand, is unveiled in Örebro on 8 October by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Finnegan Downie Dear. The concerto’s first German and UK performances are planned by the co-commissioning Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
> Further information on Work: Festen Suite
Photo: James Bellorini