Wow, many people really didn’t like this piece! I completely agree with Simon’s assessment of it, in that it makes us appreciate what comes after it. I liked the energy of the piece, and that it really gets the audience ready for the meat of the program. It isn’t meant to be a great work, and it certainly doesn’t try to be, but it is still a pleasant experience.
Thanks for the continued dedication to these world premieres, Simon! Looking forward to what is coming next.
Hey Lawrence, yes the piece does have a nice energy—but i’m not convinced it has a lot else. i’m sure you’re right, & that Turnage wasn’t intending to be a great work; fortunately for him, he succeeded big time!
Jonathan Z
12 years ago
As a musical conservative, I’m not generally a fan of modern music, although I try to keep an open mind to the point that I actively force myself to try to enjoy it. The result with Canon Fever is that I didn’t like it, but neither did i hate it. The piece didn’t provoke me to fast-forward (I’m listening on the BBC iPlayer rebroadcast), but I’m certainly not eager to hear it again.
I did enjoy the sense of a stylized pop-music rhythm which I feel I don’t hear very often in classical music (in most cases for the better) and listening for the cascading succession of repeating motives, but even that became quickly tedious
Thanks for your comment Jonathan; i’m glad you liked the piece a little more than i did. However, the “stylized pop-music rhythm” was one of the things that pushed me away, not because i dislike it in a classical context per se (Tom Adès’ Asyla kind of proves you can make it work), but simply because here it seemed crass & clumsy. That was also the case in Turnage’s last Proms piece, his execrable Beyoncé mash-up Hammered Out, so maybe there’s a theme emerging…
Paul Pellay
12 years ago
I was in the hall for this, and to me it was “in-one-ear-out-the-other” music – which quite honestly is what a lot of Turnage’s recent work sounds like to me. It was short and fizzy enough, but inoffensive, which may not have been quite what he was aiming for.
Taking this work together with some of his other recent stuff (and I add the Anna Nicole opera to this list along with Hammered Out), is Turnage maybe going through some sort of compositional mid-life crisis? For my money it’s been some time since he’s done anything comparable to what he was writing in the 1990s (3 Screaming Popes, Drowned Out, Your Rockaby, Blood on the Floor).
It really is a shame that a lot of his recent work hasn’t had a commercial recording. There’s one notable piece that really sticks out as being a masterpiece, and that is A Prayer Out of Stillness (2007) for bass and string orchestra. It is one of the most beautiful and lyrical works I’ve heard this side of the millenium. It is particularly bluesy and is partially improvised (you can look at a perusal score on boosey.com). I may upload my radio recording to YouTube one of these days, but I’d really hate to put up a recording with all sorts of extraneous noise and one of low quality.
[…] lack of enthusiasm for the occasion, due both to the recent track record of the opening night (Turnage & Weir in the last two years, both submitting relatively drab, safe pieces) as well as this […]
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Wow, many people really didn’t like this piece! I completely agree with Simon’s assessment of it, in that it makes us appreciate what comes after it. I liked the energy of the piece, and that it really gets the audience ready for the meat of the program. It isn’t meant to be a great work, and it certainly doesn’t try to be, but it is still a pleasant experience.
Thanks for the continued dedication to these world premieres, Simon! Looking forward to what is coming next.
Hey Lawrence, yes the piece does have a nice energy—but i’m not convinced it has a lot else. i’m sure you’re right, & that Turnage wasn’t intending to be a great work; fortunately for him, he succeeded big time!
As a musical conservative, I’m not generally a fan of modern music, although I try to keep an open mind to the point that I actively force myself to try to enjoy it. The result with Canon Fever is that I didn’t like it, but neither did i hate it. The piece didn’t provoke me to fast-forward (I’m listening on the BBC iPlayer rebroadcast), but I’m certainly not eager to hear it again.
I did enjoy the sense of a stylized pop-music rhythm which I feel I don’t hear very often in classical music (in most cases for the better) and listening for the cascading succession of repeating motives, but even that became quickly tedious
Thanks for your comment Jonathan; i’m glad you liked the piece a little more than i did. However, the “stylized pop-music rhythm” was one of the things that pushed me away, not because i dislike it in a classical context per se (Tom Adès’ Asyla kind of proves you can make it work), but simply because here it seemed crass & clumsy. That was also the case in Turnage’s last Proms piece, his execrable Beyoncé mash-up Hammered Out, so maybe there’s a theme emerging…
I was in the hall for this, and to me it was “in-one-ear-out-the-other” music – which quite honestly is what a lot of Turnage’s recent work sounds like to me. It was short and fizzy enough, but inoffensive, which may not have been quite what he was aiming for.
Taking this work together with some of his other recent stuff (and I add the Anna Nicole opera to this list along with Hammered Out), is Turnage maybe going through some sort of compositional mid-life crisis? For my money it’s been some time since he’s done anything comparable to what he was writing in the 1990s (3 Screaming Popes, Drowned Out, Your Rockaby, Blood on the Floor).
It really is a shame that a lot of his recent work hasn’t had a commercial recording. There’s one notable piece that really sticks out as being a masterpiece, and that is A Prayer Out of Stillness (2007) for bass and string orchestra. It is one of the most beautiful and lyrical works I’ve heard this side of the millenium. It is particularly bluesy and is partially improvised (you can look at a perusal score on boosey.com). I may upload my radio recording to YouTube one of these days, but I’d really hate to put up a recording with all sorts of extraneous noise and one of low quality.
[…] lack of enthusiasm for the occasion, due both to the recent track record of the opening night (Turnage & Weir in the last two years, both submitting relatively drab, safe pieces) as well as this […]