Turnage's opera Anna Nicole and Ferneyhough at the Barbican

In recent weeks there have been some significant and intriguing contemporary music performances in London; namely Mark Anthony Turnage's new opera Anna Nicole at ENO and Brian Ferneyhough's Total Immerson at the Barbican. These events show that new music still has the potential to surprise and delight audiences, even if in the case of the Ferneyhough they are callenging works.
    Anna Nicole based on the tragic life of the notorious celebrity Anna Nicole Smith uses a text by Richard Thomas (librettist of Jerry Springer the Opera) and is driven by the narrative. The music is effective and poignant in places but it is the text and the drama that seems to be centre stage. It seems to me that this is mid-way between an opera and a musical which makes it much more approachable for most audiences. Only in the later part of the second act does the music become more prominent. At the first performance, the audience was very enthusiastic - perhaps more so than one would expect at the first performance of a new work. To be honest it was a much more engaging evening than the last new opera I heard: Alexander Goehr's Promised End in which the music was mostly turgid and the text inaudible throughout.
    Ferneyhough at the Barbican was quite a different kind of music to the Turnage, much more challenging but also more thought-provoking. The concert I heard was with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 26th February including a UK premiere Plotzlichkeit  and also La Terre est un Homme for full orchestra. These were both very dense works with many layers of material for the listener to comprehend. It seems to me that when less was going on in the music moments of real beauty emerge - like seeing through windows in the music. We also heard Ferneyhough's early Missa Brevis which in many ways was as powerful as the other larger works in the programme, and quite astounding given it was written in 1969. Ferneyhough is certainly not everybody's cup of tea, but I think we do need composers like him to continue to challenge and amaze as well as the more crowd-pleasing Turnage.