Publisher's Synopsis
This is one of a series of handbooks on composers of today, aiming to introduce their work to a wide audience and to describe their creative development. Each volume includes a substantial interview with the composer and a comprehensive work list. Born in 1960, Mark-Anthony Turnage proclaimed his individuality with his first published work, Night Dances, for which he won the Guinness Prize for composition. His unlikely synthesis of a range of twentieth-century models - from Stravinsky through Britten and Henze, to Birtwistle - with the inflections and colours of jazz and soul music have given his works an instantly recognisable voice, while their formal assurance, harmonic imagination and instinctive lyricism have cemented his place in the front rank of composers of his generation. It is Turnage's sequence of orchestral scores that provide the thread of continuity through his development:but his operas - from Greek, a reworking of the Oedipus myth,to The Silver Tassie, based upon Sean O'Casey - show how the dramatic purposefulness and expressive range of his musical language transfer so potently to a much broader canvas.
