Mark-Anthony Turnage: Winter's Edge

Piatti Quartet

WINTER’SEDGE

Piatti Quartet

Michael Trainor violin 1

Rebecca Chan violin 2

Tetsuumi Nagata viola

Jessie Ann Richardson cello

MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE (b. 1960)

WINTER’SEDGE

Shroud (2016)

1 Threnody [11:03]

2 Intermezzo 1 [2:52]

3 March [4:20]

4 Intermezzo 2 [2:43]

5 Lament [8:06]

Winter’s Edge (2016–17)

Total playing time [52:31]

premiere recordings

The Piatti Quartet is grateful to Susie Thomson and to The Carne Trust for their support of this recording.

Recorded on 22-23 February 2022 at Holy Trinity Church, Weston

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: John Christ

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Cover photograph: Andrew Sterling / Unsplash

Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords

@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

Contemporary composers approach history in a variety of ways – from engagement to outright denial, whether of the classical past or of the many forms of music which exist around them. More than most, Mark-Anthony Turnage has opened his own work to popular styles and references. Yet it was Turnage’s childhood passion for the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, fuelled by what he recalls as obsessive listening to BBC Radio 3, that opened his mind to the creative potential of a folk tune or street song absorbed and reimagined as the theme for a rondo finale or the slow movement of a string quartet. It also informed the lyricism that pervades so many of his own compositions, a trait only strengthened by his later immersion in jazz fusion, soul music and its subgenres, and big - hearted pop tunes.

The idea of the lyrical Turnage clashes with the received image of a composer who made his name in the late 1980s with the irresistibly edgy opera Greek and reinforced his reputation soon after with Three Screaming Popes , Kai and Drowned Out, scores that revel in big, bold, extreme contrasts of symphonic sounds. Yet intimacy and tenderness of expression are never absent for long in Turnage’s music; indeed, they are essential to his surprisingly large output of works for chamber ensemble and his mature string quartets in particular. The two works presented so compellingly

here by the Piatti Quartet are products of the composer’s late fifties, deeply personal, at times shockingly so in their intensity and insights into a world of private emotions.

Shroud and Winter’s Edge, Turnage’s third and fourth published string quartets, are by a composer who clearly knows the quartet repertoire’s monuments and owns the technical skills and breadth of invention needed to remain free from their potentially stifling influence. The former work was composed in 2016 for the Emerson String Quartet, while Winter’s Edge was written for the present performers, who had first worked closely with Turnage in 2015 and have now recorded all of his first four quartets.

Anger and affection rule the outer movements of Shroud – the former delivered with relentless force in ‘Threnody’, the latter conditioned by moments of emptiness in ‘Lament’. The movements that stand between the two are marked by dark wit and sardonic humour, condensed expressions of what the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard repeatedly exposed as life’s ‘completely ridiculous’ contradictions and delusions. ‘Shroud came out of loss,’ Turnage told The Strad magazine shortly before the work’s premiere. ‘Two of my great friends died and I wanted to write something to express my feelings.’ ‘Threnody’ and ‘Lament’ helped

the composer overcome the sharpness of death and draw its sting.

‘Threnody’, named for the ancient Greek song of mourning, was written ‘in memory of Milly’, Turnage’s friend Christopher Mills. The movement opens with all four voices in unison, marking out the line of a keening lament that bears the weight and promise of some cathartic ritual. Amid the visceral intensity of this recurring theme, Turnage develops a soulful melody formed around a riff of triplet quavers, signifier of loss and love; its laidback character is eroded by complex metrical shifts and subverted by the return of the main theme riding high above menacing motor rhythms, which in turn are arrested by a sequence of tremolo chords and replaced by one futile blast from the viola and a harrowing final chord.

Accents landing on offbeats and phrases that run against the grain of expected metrical stresses act like undercover agents in ‘Intermezzo 1’, deceiving the ear into hearing a waltz while projecting an unpredictable, undanceable pattern of great rhythmic complexity. The subtle interplay of sparky melodic motifs and fluid rhythms somehow gives the impression of a movement much longer than its near-three-minute span.

‘March’ manages by turns to be playful and grave, fleetfooted and lugubrious. Its opening

suggests a parade ground on which nobody is ever in step, the viola arriving late and advertising the fact with giant stamping strides. The ghosts of musters past surface after a pause, recalled by muted strings and a chilly melody for second violin and viola. They hold their ground until the disjointed march strikes up again, to be repeated in full before once more running into silence. Snatches of an eerie chorale surface as the movement advances towards an unsettling conclusion.

‘Intermezzo 2’ draws its energy from the swing riff set out at its opening and developed throughout the movement. Textural contrasts, derived from different permutations of bowed and pizzicato sounds, enhance the procession of short themes – apt for a spirited interlude that prefaces something altogether darker.

‘Lament’ is dedicated to the memory of Dag Jiggens, Turnage’s best friend from his teens, who, as the composer recalls, introduced him to ‘a lot of non-classical music like Howlin’ Wolf and black soul music’.

Shroud ’s hallmarks of textural clarity and rhythmic precision are stamped on every bar of ‘Lament’. The movement’s emotional temperature, cool at first, boils over at its midpoint with impassioned solos for violin and cello that speak to the heart of grief. Screaming chords give way to music of aching beauty,

expressed on muted strings. But this is no lieto fine, the happy-ever-after ending of film and fiction. Turnage infuses his quartet’s farewell coda with tritone intervals, aural emblems of life’s instability and impermanence.

Winter’s Edge, co-commissioned by the Piatti Quartet, Wigmore Hall and the Brussels venue Flagey and written in 2016–17, bears the dedication ‘for my mother’s 80th birthday’. The titular phrase is both rich in connotation and hard to pin down to a single meaning; sufficient, in any case, to frame the work’s reflective disposition.

The work grows from the simplest of sighing melodies and the more ambiguous harmonies that support it. The first violin’s initial twonote motif and undulating answering phrase establish the opening movement’s prevailing sense of mystery, rooted in a restless tension between states of anxiety and near pastoral contentment. The latter rises from Turnage’s lilting second theme in 6/8 and 9/8 time, which takes on an increasingly melancholy tinge like an ancient folk ballad sung by an equally ancient folk singer. Any temptation to wallow in nostalgia is dissolved by a subtle variation on the opening theme and transformed, following a moment’s silence, by a duet for pizzicato cello and first violin. The new theme is taken up in imitative counterpoint by viola and second violin and propelled towards the emphatic

return of the movement’s first theme by an upsurge of triplet semiquavers in the cello, prefaced by densely packed melodic fragments shared by the two violins. Syncopated block chords seem to mark the victory of despair or at least its approach. They clear the way for an ethereal, otherworldly recollection of the second theme’s pastoral, now heard as a close canon for first violin, viola and cello supported by the second violin in the unfamiliar role of sustaining bass.

Shades of a languid, blues-like melody, heard early in the first movement, return in its successor, now cast in compound duple metre and explored by the three upper voices. This music’s graceful flow is interrupted by two - note pizzicato cello chords and playful violin triplets before resuming its course, transposed lower, warmer than before yet instantly recognisable. The viola countermelody from the movement’s opening is promoted to a solo theme, taken up by the first violin and marked to be played with the bow close to the bridge; its companions also adopt sul ponticello bowing to create what feels like the sudden snap of frost at sundown. Things soon heat up with a return to ordinary bowing and the intensification of Turnage’s counterpoint. Emphatic dynamic contrasts yield to a wistful coda, built from a final iteration of the main theme and capped by a delicious D minor chord with added sixth, seventh and ninth.

And now the hunt is up. The third movement’s swift progress is spurred on by Turnage’s marriage of compositional logic and rhythmic precision to impish humour and a theme fit for dancing. Yet its headlong dash is soon arrested by a stuttering cello riff and a boozy version of the dance-band tune, until the chase resumes from a flurry of rapid-fire quavers. There’s something of the travelling fairground or circus ring about what comes next, presided over by a swaggering solo violin melody dressed in the style of Shostakovich. The movement’s main theme finds fresh legs; once restored, it sings and dances towards the string quartet equivalent of three thigh slaps.

A wordless chorale stands as the final movement’s slow introduction, played with little vibrato and answered by a ruminative solo violin melody. If we have not heard it already, this now is surely winter’s

edge – a place of stasis but not stagnation, from which the fresh impetus of a viola melody rises and is matched by the feel of syncopated swung quavers. The stillness and concentration of what follows transcend the beat of clock time and striving within the bounds of finite space; the quartet’s voices are lifted high into the upper reaches of their respective ranges to evoke Wordsworthian ‘gleams of half-extinguished thought’, a sad and sombre music yet heartening in its profound sense of compassion.

© 2023 Andrew Stewart

Andrew Stewart is a seasoned freelance author and journalist, specialising in classical music. He also writes about visual art, most recently as co-author of Suzanne Cooper: Paintings Under the Spare-Room Bed (The Mainstone Press, 2022).

Described as ‘a signally impressive young ensemble’ (Sunday Times ), the Piatti Quartet have been also praised for their ‘perfect ensemble’ and ‘acute sensitivity’ (Gramophone ). The group rose to prominence after their multiple prizewinning performances at the 2015 Wigmore Hall

International String Quartet Competition, including the Sidney Griller Award for the best performance of a contemporary set work.

This piece was Contusion, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s second string quartet, and the award would set in motion a long association with the composer. Since 2015, they have recorded Turnage’s first two quartets – Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad and Contusion – on the Champs Hill and NMC labels respectively as well as commissioning his fourth, Winter’s Edge, which they premiered at the Klara Radio Festival in Brussels in March 2019.

Since their inception they have always had projects in the recording studio, with critically acclaimed releases on many labels of music ranging from Mozart, Mendelssohn and Britten to contemporary composers such as Joseph Phibbs and Gavin Higgins.

Their recent recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge on Hyperion Records, with tenor Nicky Spence and pianist Julius Drake, received Editor’s Choices from Gramophone, Limelight and BBC Music Magazine and is shortlisted in the 2022 Gramophone Awards.

They have performed all around Europe including at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the National Concert Hall, Dublin, the Gaudi-built Casa Milà (La Pedrera) in Barcelona and the Albert Long Hall of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, with many concerts being accompanied by radio broadcasts.

Sharing a stage with guests brings much joy to the quartet and recent partnerships include Ian Bostridge, Nicky Spence, Michael Collins, Belcea Quartet, Barry Douglas, Janina Fialkowska, Melvyn Tan, Julius Drake, Katherine Broderick and Adam Walker.

The Piatti Quartet takes its name from the great nineteenth-century cellist Alfredo Piatti, who was a leading professor and exponent of chamber music at the Royal Academy of Music.

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