United Kingdom Bartók, Turnage, Mussorgsky: Alina Ibragimova (violin), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 1.4.2026. (AV-E)
Turnage – Three Screaming Popes (1988-1989)
Bartók – Violin Concerto No.1 (1907-1908)
Mussorgsky/Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition (1874-1922)
For the first work on the programme, Three Screaming Popes, the vehemently-visceral Mark-Anthony Turnage recalls a 1985 visit to the Tate: ‘I was particularly taken with the three Pope paintings, based on Innocent X by Velázquez… my initial idea was to write a piece which distorted a set of Spanish dances as Bacon had distorted and restated the Velázquez. In the process, the dances — like a first layer of paint — became so submerged that only a faint trace is visible. What I hope comes across is the colouristic intensity and emotional immediacy.’
Having single-handedly curated the largest Francis Bacon News Archive on the planet since the year 2000, it may sound daunting — perhaps even sacrilegious — to admit in all honesty that I had never heard this score until tonight. For years, I harboured an intellectual superstition that to hear it in the flesh would be a form of heresy, even blasphemy; uncannily akin to Bacon not viewing Innocent X by Velázquez whilst visiting Rome in 1954.
How utterly wrong I was. This is a magnolectric masterpiece of orthomolecular orchestration that captures the very textures and visceral pigments of Bacon’s paint. Crucially, the work defies the clock; those alleged fifteen minutes possessed no sensation of duration. We heard it outside of time, as if the score were conceived and executed not in the chronology of time, but in the raw immediacy of pure being.
Listening to Three Screaming Popes, it became papally-palpably clear to me that Turnage understood Bacon far more than those ‘Bacon experts’ — David Sylvester and Michael Peppiatt — who largely built careers by exploiting the artist while never truly understanding him.
As Bacon rightly said: ‘paint has a language of its own’; just as music has a language of its own. The language of paint and the language of music is alien to the language of the word. We can critique the conducting or the execution, but the score-in-itself remains as elusive as being-in-itself. I am ashamed of words for they are powerless to do justice to Turnage’s scorching score. It is far more important that you hear Three Screaming Popes rather than read what rubbish I write about it.
Ultimately, the genie-genius of Turnage lies in an astonishing ability to ‘translate’ paint into sound — possessing an instinctive intuition of the music that paint can make, whilst knowingly navigating the sound of the image.
I cannot imagine this wondrous work being conducted or played with greater intensity and devoted commitment than it was. Turnage certainly showed his fervent feelings for Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra when beckoned upon the stage, receiving an appreciative applause from the autofluorescent audience.
Given the programme was just over one hour, concert curator Gardner could have easily included both Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959) and Morton Feldman’s The Rothko Chapel (1971). Bacon was on record as loathing both painters and said to Melvyn Bragg in 1985: ‘Rothko completely escaped me. I think they’re the most dreary paintings that have ever been made.’ Juxtaposing such aesthetic-adversaries would have constituted a malicious-masterstroke of mischievous-modernism. Just a twisted thought.
Bartók’s Violin Concerto No.1 is less a conventional concerto and more a porous-portrait in sorrowful-sounds — a musical miniature of the mutinous-muse violinist Stefi Geyer.
The wounded work is steeped in the composer’s intense, unrequited obsession, capturing a duality of character that borders on the psychopathological. At the core of this fixation lies a rising major-seventh motif — the ‘Geyer chord’ — which permeates the opening movement like a spectral recurring dream.
In the Bartók, the alluringly agile Alina Ibragimova was brilliantly bold, offering an interpretation of uncouth-sophistication that was simultaneously witty-gritty and rawly-refined. Throughout, Gardner provided promiscuous support, soaking her playing with soapsuds-sounds that lathered the languid lady laid bare.
Depressingly, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition was risible, even pitiful, and never ignited for me. The conducting was far too slack, lethargic, and plodded along like a slow walk through a room full of miserably marooned maroon murals by Rothko.
The Gnome: Usually a creature of mediocre malice, this was a sedentary imp. It offered a tepid tiptoe entirely devoid of rhythmic grit.
The Old Castle: Here, Gardner steered the LPO past mundane maroon-and-gold murals of a 1960s Wimpy Bar — recalling Rothko (again).
Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle was the gallery’s singular success. Paul Beniston’s shrill, hysterical muted trumpet offered a caustic characterisation, exposing the prototype prejudice baked the very groin of the score.
The Great Gate of Kiev: This was deafeningly loud and bombastic played at full-volume and sadly devoid of power and majesty, sounding more like the grating gates of hell. Not surprisingly, such a vacuous din brought the house down.
Alexander Verney-Elliott