Mark-Anthony Turnage

Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage established his reputation in the 1980s and '90s as an edgy, streetwise bad boy of concert music, causing abrasive impact with orchestral scores like Three Screaming Popes (a response to the disturbing visual imagery of Francis Bacon, 1989) and Blood on the Floor (he has a way with titles, 1996). But tough as his idiom can be, it comes with a soulful beauty drawn from jazz and blues that makes his writing smoulder like a film noir soundtrack. His solo instrument of choice is the saxophone, and his role models run more toward Miles Davis than to the grandees of the European avant-garde. Born in 1960 in Essex, Turnage favoured sociopolitical themes in his earlier work, including his first opera, Greek, which made headlines when it premiered in 1988. Turnage’s initial response had been that opera wasn’t his world. But basing the piece on a hard-hitting play by Steven Berkoff about the underclass, he met the world of opera head-on—and had resounding subsequent successes with The Silver Tassie (about war and football, 2000) and Anna Nicole (a robust retelling of the life and death of the Playboy model, 2011).