First performed in Berlin two years ago under Simon Rattle, Mark-Anthony Turnage's choral work A Relic of Memory had its UK premiere under Vladimir Jurowski at the start of the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Prom. Taking its title from a poem by Seamus Heaney, it sets four lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71, interspersed with fragments of the Requiem Mass, and ends with the short piece Calmo, which Turnage composed in memory of his friend Sue Knussen in 2003.
The work is suffused with memorial imagery - not just in the words but also in its atmospheric use of bells, and in oblique references to the opening chorus of Bach's St Matthew Passion, one of the grandest statements of mourning in western music. Yet the overall effect is hardly consolatory, encompassing as it does fierce anger as well as grief. The weight of the scoring masks the choral writing at times, though elsewhere the textures range from lucid to sparse. The London Philharmonic Choir sounded tentative in this performance, and the piece did not register as Jurowski's natural element, either.
His customary command was more in evidence in the performance of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto that followed. Soloist Nikolai Lugansky employed subtle colourings to shade fearsome piano writing - the kind where many players would be satisfied just to subdue Prokofiev's armfuls of notes. He and Jurowski defined precisely the concerto's extravagant variety in their wide-ranging tour of early modernism, also taking in remnants of the Russian late-Romantic school.
This was more comprehensively represented after the interval in the shape of Rachmaninov's choral symphony, The Bells. However, Jurowski's grasp of the work's overall structure was less impressive than his highlighting of its many striking imaginative touches.
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