Turnage: The Silver Tassie (CD)

“Gerald Finley is magnificent as Harry” BBC Music magazine

“Gerald Finley is the standout in the demanding role of the protagonist…” Opera News

“…Gerald Finley, whose clear, dark, incisive baritone is powerful from first to last” The Guardian

Composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage
Conductor: Paul Daniel

Performers:

Harry Heegan – Gerald Finley
Sylvester, Harry’s father – John Graham-Hall
Mrs Heegan, Harry’s mother – Anne Howells
Susie, the girl downstairs – Sarah Connolly
Mrs Foran, an upstairs neighbour – Vivian Tierney
Teddy, her husband – David Kempster
Barney, Harry’s best friend – Leslie John Flanagan
Jessie, Harry’s girlfriend – Mary Hegarty
Dr Maxwell – Mark Le Brocq
The Croucher – Gwynne Howell
Staff Officer – Bradley Daley
Corporal – Jozef Koc
Chorus and Orchestra of English National Opera

Recorded live at the London Coliseum on 24/26/29 February & 3 March 2000
Release date: March 9, 2004.
Label: Eno Alive, 2 CDs
ASIN: B0001KL5BC

Click here for details of the performance associated with this CD

What the critics say

Edward Greenfield for the Guardian, July 12, 2002

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,753750,00.html

Rating four stars out of five

Few recent operas begin to match The Silver Tassie by Mark-Anthony Turnage in its brutal dramatic power. Based on Sean O’Casey’s play on the futility of war, the libretto is tautly conceived by Amanda Holden. This splendid live recording of the original production is the first issue in what one hopes will be a regular series from English National Opera.

The performance on disc, brilliantly conducted by Paul Daniel, brings home all the more clearly the overall musical plan of the four acts. The first act, busy and dissonant, sets out the musical material, as we see Harry returning from his football triumph with the Silver Tassie. The trenches act then forms a slow movement, with cynical biblical misquotations and chanting choruses of soldiers. The hospital scene of act three, with Harry confined to a wheelchair, becomes a bitter Scherzo, leading to the vigorous dance-based finale, when the rejoicing at the armistice is cruelly counterpointed against the frustration of Harry and his blinded pal Teddy, heightened musically by their agonised solos and duets.

It plainly helped that Turnage had in mind the singer who takes the central role of Harry, Gerald Finley, whose clear, dark, incisive baritone is powerful from first to last. David Kempster sings strongly as Teddy, while Sarah Connolly makes Susie, the prim religious bigot who becomes Harry’s nurse, into a movingly frustrated character, with Harry’s mother and father vividly taken by Anne Howells and John Graham-Hall.

Timothy Ball for classicalsource.com

http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_cd_review.php?id=919

This is the first release on ENO’s own label. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the major record companies who have promoted Turnage hitherto did not feel able to record this opera, but is an adventurous choice to launch ENO Alive.

Based on the Sean O’Casey play, The Silver Tassie tells the story of Harry, a football hero, who is injured in the trenches during the First World War and is left paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. Amanda Holden’s libretto is excellent, with a taut approach to language making the words ideal for musical illustration.

Turnage’s musical vocabulary is eclectic and is not in any way forbidding as some contemporary composers can be. It is, however, strident in places, not least at the start of the opera where a short prelude presents various thematic ideas that will be heard and developed later on. These are pithy, as is the most memorable theme – Harry and Barney’s duet “Play the game” which has a nagging quality and is repeated later at key moments when football is mentioned.

The first act is set in the Heegans’ flat in Dublin where Harry’s parents are waiting for him to return from a football match prior to his departure for the army. Domestic squabbling from the neighbours and religious exhortations from Susie punctuate the expressions of pride that the Heegans feel for their son. In some ways I found this opening to be the least successful part of the opera. The characters are not really presented terribly sympathetically. We don’t feel engaged with them and therefore don’t care about them. Moreover, the orchestral accompaniment is not always apposite – Mrs Foran’s burning of a steak in a frying pan is illustrated as if a volcano were erupting. However, what becomes quite clear is the involvement of the cast in the characters they are portraying. The composer is lucky indeed to have such committed advocates. I would quibble, however, with John Graham-Hall as Sylvester – good as he is. Graham-Hall simply sounds too young to be convincing as Harry’s father.

We do not see very much of Harry who returns from the football match bearing the victory cup (the Tassie of the title) with his friends, since he departs soon after for the trenches. A tempestuous orchestral interlude (based on the “Play the game” theme) leads to Act Two set on the battlefront and opens with the Croucher – a kind of bible-reader – quoting and misquoting scripture in a world-worn and sometimes cynical manner. Gwynne Howell is superb in this role.

In the interview with the composer in the accompanying booklet, Turnage expresses his anxiety that this act should not sound like a “bad Britten War Requiem”. Ironically enough, this is the precise place where the music is at its most Britten-ish. The male chorus brings to mind the sailors in Billy Budd and the weary tread of the orchestra suggests exhaustion and resignation. The only characters who show a bit of life are the officers – shades of Berg’s Wozzeck here.

We see nothing of Harry or his comrades in this act and I wonder whether we might feel more engaged with his plight if we had done so. The writing for the male voices (and boys’ voices later that quote a folksong) is effective and evocative. The act ends with the men starting a football game – only to be cut off and summoned into battle.

Act Three finds us back in Dublin, this time in a hospital ward, where Harry is a patient and Susie a nurse. She seems to have abandoned her religious zeal displayed in the first act, for no apparent reason. Harry awaits an operation that will potentially cure his paralysis. It was here that I really started to feel empathy for the characters and this spilled over to the last act where a dance is going on at a football club, but Harry’s operation has failed, and he is bitter and demoralised. Teddy has gone blind and both try to console one another. This leads to a most moving final scene which begins with the most extended piece of lyrical writing in the opera – Harry’s aria “Dear God, this crippled form is still your child”, but Harry’s family and friends observe “we who have come through the fire unharmed must go on living”. The Silver Tassie – the symbol, surely, of Harry’s physical prowess – lies empty on the stage. During this act, there is an off-stage band playing ’mock’ dances and reels and serves as a kind of commentary on the proceedings rather in the manner of Act 3 of Britten’s Peter Grimes.

As I have indicated, the cast is a strong one, with no weak links (my one reservation aside) – not something that can be said of all opera performances or recordings of even the standard repertoire. Gerald Finley makes for a believable central figure and is ably supported by his colleagues. The orchestra, as recorded, sounds a little thin in places – especially the strings – but they play what is often hair-raisingly difficult music with confidence and conviction. Special mention should be made of the saxophone and bassoon players who have several exposed solos. Co- ordination and balance between stage and pit is fine most of the time but there are moments that would have been re-taken had the opera been recorded in the studio. The overall sound is clear with the words coming over strongly. It will be interesting to see how ENO Alive develops, but it has certainly got off to a strong start.

Arlo McKinnon, Opera News, January  2004 , vol 68 , no.7

The Silver Tassie, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera based on the play of the same name by Sean O’Casey, was created under the auspices of the English National Opera Studio, a laudable program in which a composer not only receives a commission and first performances of a new opera but gets to workshop the work-in-progress, thus being afforded the opportunity to test and refine ideas before the official world premiere. The present live recording is derived from performances that occurred shortly after the opera’s world premiere, in February 2000.

O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie addresses the tragic effects of warfare, particularly as experienced in World War I. Turnage’s opera is true to the play, retaining much of its text. O’Casey frequently suggested specific music to accompany scenes in his plays, often including these notated tunes in the published versions of his plays. In The Silver Tassie, O’Casey took this concept to an experimental height. To express the other-worldliness of trench warfare, the playwright has most of his Act II performed in chants and songs, rather than in spoken dialogue. In practice, this feature proved ineffective. Turnage has retained but one of these battlefield melodies, and in Act IV he incorporates a popular tango that O’Casey is thought once to have suggested. Otherwise, the composer wisely has eschewed O’Casey’s musical suggestions and gone his own way.

Turnage has done something rather unusual and creative with the play’s structure. Without becoming pedantic, he relates the four acts to the framework of standard symphonic structure, writing the acts as, respectively, an exposition, a slow movement, a scherzo and a dance-filled finale. In general, this conception has yielded highly successful results. Act I is overwritten – more complex than it needs to be – until Turnage’s haunting inclusion at the act’s climax of a Robert Burns folk song, “O bring to me a pot of wine/ and fill it in a silver tassie….” From this point forward the music finds its true voice and the opera moves from strength to strength.

Amanda Holden’s adaptation of the play is a model of elegant concision. Heretical as this may read to O’Casey fanatics, several aspects of the play benefit from Holden’s treatment. Acts II and III in particular are transformed into streamlined, more effective dramatic vehicles.

The cast is well chosen. Baritone Gerald Finley is the standout in the demanding role of the protagonist, Harry Heegan, persuasively affective throughout, growing in power as the opera progresses. Mezzo Sarah Connolly effortlessly traverses the wide tessitura of Susie, and Gwynne Howell is tremendous in his brief appearance as Croucher. Paul Daniel draws an intense yet finely balanced performance from the orchestra and chorus.

This is a very strong piece of musical theater, one that deserves to be heard on this side of the Atlantic. (Finley included one of Harry’s arias in an Alice Tully Hall recital, in the spring of 2003.) Sadly, post-9/11 budgetary cutbacks caused Dallas Opera to cancel its American premiere of The Silver Tassie, originally scheduled for the fall of 2002. One can only hope that ENO’s release of this recording will spark a new opportunity for a theatrical presentation of The Silver Tassie in the U.S.

BBC Music Magazine

Performance: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 4 out of 5 stars

In The Silver Tassie, Mark-Anthony Turnage drew on the lyrical beauty of The Country of the Blind and the terse, demotic delivery of Greek to create a conventional opera on a grand scale. Seeing the first performance at the London Coliseum, I felt at times the overburdened orchestral textures threatened to overwhelm its dark force. Certainly, Turnage’s predilection for lower vocal registers and bass instrumentation gives the work both its strong emotional undertow and its worst patches of fog. But ultimately, The Silver Tassie must stand or fall by its success in conveying the pathos of O’Casey’s play, about a crippled young blood returning from Flanders to an Irish village. And on hearing this well-recorded live performance, its tragic power is not in question. Turnage himself viewed the opera from the start like a symphony, with a first-movement exposition, a string-heavy slow movement, a wind-dominated ‘scherzo’, and a finale constructed from curdled dance tunes. The whole is tightly organised and shot through with catchy motifs that slide from football chants at that start into the bitter rhetoric of despair. Gerald Finley is magnificent as Harry, the sporting hero turned paraplegic, driven by physical energy and then pure anger. He sustains the role well, despite the often uniform shape and pacing of the lines. Sarah Connolly’s part as the nurse Susie was also written for her. From her first piercing warning, ‘God is looking at you’, she is a compelling presence, in fine voice. Mary Hegarty is a sweet-toned Jessie, though, like Connolly, she slips in and out of an Irish brogue. Less focused is Gwynne Howell as the Croucher, Prophet of Doom in the trenches: his monotonous declamations are not helped by a wide wobble, and the generally strong chorus sounds ropey here. I found the ‘slow’ movement the dramatic weak-point of the opera, as it is of the play: a soporific rather than chilling meditation on the futility of war. More poignant is the penultimate lament of the blinded Teddy (the rich-voiced David Kempster) and Harry, to the keening accompaniment of a soprano sax. I wished at the time that the opera could have ended here, with its glacial brass chords. In fact, there is some even more extraordinary music in the final scenes, notably the serene coda, with its patter of fiddle and dancing feet.