Twice Through the Heart
Encyclopedia
Twice Through the Heart is a musical work by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage
, variously described as a dramatic scena
, as a monodrama
, as a song cycle
, as a chamber opera
or even as a "dramatic song-cycle-cum-scena". It is scored for mezzo-soprano
and 16 instrumentalists and sets an English-language libretto
by the Scottish poet Jackie Kay
based on her script for a television programme about a woman jailed for killing her violent husband.
Originally intended to be a full-length opera
, Twice was composed between 1994 and 1996, undergoing substantial reworking before Turnage found a form with which he was satisfied. It was first performed in 1997 when it was put on both in the concert hall and in the opera house. The critical reception has been generally favourable, with several authors commenting positively about the instrumental writing and emotional impact of the work, though some critics see limitations in the libretto, find the mood of the work too unrelenting or note the great demands that the vocal writing provides for the soloist.
Twice Through the Heart is based on a 1992 poetry documentary of the same name which Kay had written for the BBC
television series Words on Film. Kay was concerned by inequalities in how the legal system treats men and women who kill their spouses and, in particular, in how the law on provocation
in the United Kingdom was then interpreted, allowing a defence to murder only in the context of what happened immediately before a homicide and excluding the battered woman defence
which considers the broader context which may have involved years of violent abuse. She chose to base the poems on a specific true case, that of Amelia Rossiter, a woman in her sixties who refused to give evidence in court about the years of violence from her husband that eventually led to her stabbing him twice through the heart with a kitchen knife. By the time Kay's programme was broadcast, Rossiter had been freed, her conviction reduced to manslaughter
after her plea of provocation was accepted.
Turnage, who had previously composed one full-length opera, Greek
, worked on the musical version of Twice between 1994 and 1996. It was commissioned by the John S. Cohen Foundation. He had learnt of Kay's original work after he was shown a copy of the BBC video by poet and artistic director Maura Dooley. It was a difficult development with Turnage at one point abandoning the work in favour of other pieces. Composer and librettist had started out with the intention of developing a full-length opera
including both soprano
and baritone
narrators. (The original television script had included poems for the judge as well as for the woman.) However, the creators felt that their attempts at redeveloping and expanding the original work "water[ed] down its impact" and they eventually cut everything apart from the woman's words. Both text and setting also underwent repeated changes in detail. Kay changed some of the wording to make it easier to sing. Similarly, Turnage revised the music after trying it out with Sally Burgess
who was to give the first performance. He had become Composer in Association with English National Opera
(ENO) in 1995 and was able to thoroughly workshop Twice and its companion piece with ENO's Contemporary Opera Studio before arriving at their respective final versions.
arranged in three sections. It is narrated by a woman in the prison cell where she has been sent for the murder of her husband. To express the woman's feelings, Kay deliberately chose a voice that was unpoetic: "I wanted the voice to be so everyday, it would be banal." Turnage's music too includes similarly basic material, what critic Tom Service describes as "simple hummable tunes", but these are transformed and distorted, a metaphor for how initial loving intimacy is destroyed and distorted by years of violence and abuse. Turnage's musical language is modernist
but influenced by jazz
, an area of musical interest he shared with Kay.
The instrumental scoring is for flute
(doubling alto flute), oboe
(doubling cor anglais
), 2 clarinet
s (one doubling bass clarinet), horn
, trumpet
, trombone
, one percussionist
, harp
, piano
(doubling celeste
), violin
, 2 viola
s, 2 cello
s and double bass
. The percussion consists of 8 crotales
, vibraphone
, marimba
, suspended cymbal
, 3 gong
s, tam-tam, bass drum
, pedal bass drum, ratchet
, claves
and whip
.
2. Inside (part 1) — The woman is in jail thinking of how she failed to take her lawyer's advice to give evidence about her husband's violence, because she did not want to be disloyal.
3. Love — She remembers how she and her husband once loved each other and how things went wrong after their child was born.
5. Inside (part 2) — She thinks of her husband and of her "heart, broken like bones".
6. Four Walls — She is trapped within the four walls of her house, her husband turning down suggestions of holidays and writing instructions for her in notes.
8. Landslide — Her husband is buried in land, she in prison.
9. China Cup — She is locked in with only the decorated china cup which she has taken from home to prison.
Twice Through the Heart was first performed on 13 June 1997 at the Snape Maltings
Concert Hall during the 50th Aldeburgh Festival
. Sally Burgess was accompanied by the ENO Contemporary Opera Studio conducted by Nicholas Kok. The companion piece was the chamber opera
The Country of the Blind which Turnage had composed relatively quickly in order to make up a full programme after Twice had turned out much shorter than originally intended. To Turnage's surprise, ENO decided to follow up the original four performances, split between Snape Maltings and the Queen Elizabeth Hall
, with a staging at its main home in the London Coliseum. This production was premiered on 20 October 1997 with Susan Bickley as the soloist and with Kok again conducting. In this context it was a companion piece for From the House of the Dead
, an opera set in a Siberia
n prison camp.
Twice had received its mainland European premiere a day earlier than the first Coliseum performance, when it was given by the State Opera in Gießen
, Germany. In 1998, Twice received its North American premiere in Winnipeg
, Canada and was also given in the United States, (by the New York Philharmonic
,) Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these last two countries composer Oliver Knussen
conducted. The work has continued to receive international performances, for example by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
in 2009.
A commercial recording was made in 2007 with Sarah Connolly
singing and Marin Alsop
conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra
. Some live performances have been recorded for broadcast, including one at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the original performers, and the Winnipeg performance.
, Nick Kimberley felt that the Twice Through the Heart "w[ore] the scars of a difficult birth" with Sally Burgess "strain[ing] to find specific expression in the sharp angles and steep slides Turnage provided" in a work that Kimberley considered less natural than its relatively quickly written companion piece. For this critic, the instrumental writing came over far more successfully than the vocal part with Kimberley praising the use of colour and finding the "draining" final climax particularly effective. Michael Kennedy
, in contrast to Kimberley, found the scena "the more dramatic and musically more inventive" of the two works performed that night.
Bernard Holland
, of The New York Times
heard both the Aldeburgh and New York premieres. He noted the influence both of Alban Berg
and, in the strings and percussion, of rock music and appreciated a musical language that makes modernism easier on the ears. However, he felt a degree of ambivalence about a composer he described as "theatrical... in both the good and bad senses of the word."
Geoff Brown, reviewing Marin Alsop and Sarah Connolly's recording in The Times
, praised the directness of both Kay's and Turnage's writing and described Twice Through the Heart and its "awful clarity" as "among the best in Turnage's recent output". David Gutman suggested in Gramophone that "if listeners feel uncomfortable with the mix of artful delivery and documentary realism, that may be part of the intended effect." The critics of The Daily Telegraph
were later to list this disc among the hundred best classical recordings.
John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune
noted the trickiness of the solo part and criticised the "banality" of Kay's verse but reported that he "was held by the sensitive lyrical, rather Bergian vocal writing and often translucent scoring". "The woman's suppressed anger and fear rise to the surface through Turnage's music — poignant gritty yet always compassionate." Considering the same Chicago performance, freelance music critic Lawrence A. Johnson, was taken by the use of instrumental colour and also by Turnage's "whipcrack rhythmic vitality", but "If Twice through the Heart [sic] just misses being one of Turnage's top-drawer works, it's because of the somewhat unvaried air of doleful melancholy as well as the text's more pedestrian moments and repetition."
Not all critics have been hostile to Kay's poetry: reviewing a concert by the London Sinfonietta
, Nicholas Williams refers to her "arresting text". Whether positive or negative, the music critics only assessed part of Kay's original work. In considering the original television version of Twice, the literary critic Laura Severin, praised the contrasted voices and the use of repetition as an adaptation to a medium where listeners would be less attentive to the words than if they were attending a conventional poetry reading. She also saw Kay's portrayal of Rossiter as one that avoided both a conventional masculine representation of her as a ruthless murderer and an overly simplistic feminist
one of her as a passive victim.
Mark-Anthony Turnage
Mark-Anthony Turnage is a prolific English composer of classical music. His initial musical studies were with Oliver Knussen, John Lambert, and later with Gunther Schuller...
, variously described as a dramatic scena
Concert Aria
A concert aria is normally a free-standing aria or opera-like scene composed for singer and orchestra, written specifically for performance in concert rather than as part of an opera...
, as a monodrama
Monodrama
A monodrama is a theatrical or operatic piece played by a single actor or singer, usually portraying one character.- Monodrama in opera :...
, as a song cycle
Song cycle
A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...
, as a chamber opera
Chamber opera
Chamber opera is a designation for operas written to be performed with a chamber ensemble rather than a full orchestra.The term and form were invented by Benjamin Britten in the 1940s, when the English Opera Group needed works that could easily be taken on tour and performed in a variety of small...
or even as a "dramatic song-cycle-cum-scena". It is scored for mezzo-soprano
Mezzo-soprano
A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...
and 16 instrumentalists and sets an English-language libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
by the Scottish poet Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay MBE is a Scottish poet and novelist.-Biography:Jackie Kay was born in Glasgow in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Jonathan C. Okafor who later became a prominent tropical plant taxonomist...
based on her script for a television programme about a woman jailed for killing her violent husband.
Originally intended to be a full-length opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
, Twice was composed between 1994 and 1996, undergoing substantial reworking before Turnage found a form with which he was satisfied. It was first performed in 1997 when it was put on both in the concert hall and in the opera house. The critical reception has been generally favourable, with several authors commenting positively about the instrumental writing and emotional impact of the work, though some critics see limitations in the libretto, find the mood of the work too unrelenting or note the great demands that the vocal writing provides for the soloist.
Background and composition
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
television series Words on Film. Kay was concerned by inequalities in how the legal system treats men and women who kill their spouses and, in particular, in how the law on provocation
Provocation (legal)
In criminal law, provocation is a possible defense by excuse or exculpation alleging a sudden or temporary loss of control as a response to another's provocative conduct sufficient to justify an acquittal, a mitigated sentence or a conviction for a lesser charge...
in the United Kingdom was then interpreted, allowing a defence to murder only in the context of what happened immediately before a homicide and excluding the battered woman defence
Battered woman defence
The battered woman defense is a defense used in court that the person accused of an assault / murder was suffering from battered person syndrome at the material time. Because the defense is most commonly used by women, it is usually characterised in court as battered woman syndrome or battered wife...
which considers the broader context which may have involved years of violent abuse. She chose to base the poems on a specific true case, that of Amelia Rossiter, a woman in her sixties who refused to give evidence in court about the years of violence from her husband that eventually led to her stabbing him twice through the heart with a kitchen knife. By the time Kay's programme was broadcast, Rossiter had been freed, her conviction reduced to manslaughter
Manslaughter
Manslaughter is a legal term for the killing of a human being, in a manner considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is said to have first been made by the Ancient Athenian lawmaker Dracon in the 7th century BC.The law generally differentiates...
after her plea of provocation was accepted.
Turnage, who had previously composed one full-length opera, Greek
Greek (opera)
Greek is an opera in two acts composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage to a libretto adapted by Turnage and Jonathan Moore from Steven Berkoff's 1980 verse play Greek. The play and the opera are a re-telling of Sophocles's Greek tragedy Oedipus the King with the setting changed to the East End of London in...
, worked on the musical version of Twice between 1994 and 1996. It was commissioned by the John S. Cohen Foundation. He had learnt of Kay's original work after he was shown a copy of the BBC video by poet and artistic director Maura Dooley. It was a difficult development with Turnage at one point abandoning the work in favour of other pieces. Composer and librettist had started out with the intention of developing a full-length opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
including both soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
and baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
narrators. (The original television script had included poems for the judge as well as for the woman.) However, the creators felt that their attempts at redeveloping and expanding the original work "water[ed] down its impact" and they eventually cut everything apart from the woman's words. Both text and setting also underwent repeated changes in detail. Kay changed some of the wording to make it easier to sing. Similarly, Turnage revised the music after trying it out with Sally Burgess
Sally Burgess
Sally Burgess FRCM is a South Africa-born British operatic lyric mezzo-soprano, opera director, and educator. She has been a Fellow and Professor of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music since 2004, as well as teaching stagecraft...
who was to give the first performance. He had become Composer in Association with English National Opera
English National Opera
English National Opera is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St. Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden...
(ENO) in 1995 and was able to thoroughly workshop Twice and its companion piece with ENO's Contemporary Opera Studio before arriving at their respective final versions.
Description
Twice Through the Heart lasts for approximately 30 minutes. It consists of nine musical numbersNumber (music)
A number in music is a self-contained piece that is combined with other such pieces in a performance. In a concert of popular music, for example, the individual songs or pieces performed are often referred to as "numbers." The term is applied also to sections of large vocal works when the...
arranged in three sections. It is narrated by a woman in the prison cell where she has been sent for the murder of her husband. To express the woman's feelings, Kay deliberately chose a voice that was unpoetic: "I wanted the voice to be so everyday, it would be banal." Turnage's music too includes similarly basic material, what critic Tom Service describes as "simple hummable tunes", but these are transformed and distorted, a metaphor for how initial loving intimacy is destroyed and distorted by years of violence and abuse. Turnage's musical language is modernist
Modernism (music)
Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice.- Defining musical modernism :...
but influenced by jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, an area of musical interest he shared with Kay.
The instrumental scoring is for flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
(doubling alto flute), oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...
(doubling cor anglais
Cor anglais
The cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....
), 2 clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
s (one doubling bass clarinet), horn
Horn (instrument)
The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....
, trumpet
Trumpet
The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...
, trombone
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...
, one percussionist
Percussion instrument
A percussion instrument is any object which produces a sound when hit with an implement or when it is shaken, rubbed, scraped, or otherwise acted upon in a way that sets the object into vibration...
, harp
Harp
The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...
, piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
(doubling celeste
Celesta
The celesta or celeste is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano or of a large wooden music box . The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal plates suspended over wooden resonators...
), violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
, 2 viola
Viola
The viola is a bowed string instrument. It is the middle voice of the violin family, between the violin and the cello.- Form :The viola is similar in material and construction to the violin. A full-size viola's body is between and longer than the body of a full-size violin , with an average...
s, 2 cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
s and double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...
. The percussion consists of 8 crotales
Crotales
thumb|right|Crotales are often used with other mallet percussionCrotales , sometimes called antique cymbals, are percussion instruments consisting of small, tuned bronze or brass disks. Each is about 4 inches in diameter with a flat top surface and a nipple on the base. They are commonly...
, vibraphone
Vibraphone
The vibraphone, sometimes called the vibraharp or simply the vibes, is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family....
, marimba
Marimba
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...
, suspended cymbal
Suspended cymbal
right|thumb|Classical suspended cymbalA suspended cymbal is any single cymbal played with a stick or beater rather than struck against another cymbal. A common abbreviation used is sus. cym., or sus. cymb. .-History:...
, 3 gong
Gong
A gong is an East and South East Asian musical percussion instrument that takes the form of a flat metal disc which is hit with a mallet....
s, tam-tam, bass drum
Bass drum
Bass drums are percussion instruments that can vary in size and are used in several musical genres. Three major types of bass drums can be distinguished. The type usually seen or heard in orchestral, ensemble or concert band music is the orchestral, or concert bass drum . It is the largest drum of...
, pedal bass drum, ratchet
Ratchet (instrument)
A ratchet, also called a noisemaker , is an orchestral musical instrument played by percussionists. Operating on the principle of the ratchet device, a gearwheel and a stiff board is mounted on a handle, which can be freely rotated...
, claves
Claves
Claves are a percussion instrument , consisting of a pair of short Claves (Anglicized pronunciation: clah-vays, IPA:[ˈklαves]) are a percussion instrument (idiophone), consisting of a pair of short Claves (Anglicized pronunciation: clah-vays, IPA:[ˈklαves]) are a percussion instrument (idiophone),...
and whip
Whip (instrument)
In music, a whip or slapstick is a percussion instrument consisting of two wooden boards joined by a hinge at one end. When the boards are brought together rapidly, the sound is reminiscent of the crack of a whip. It is often used in modern orchestras, bands, and percussion ensembles.There are...
.
Part One
1. No Way Out — The woman tells of how her husband beat her and threatened to garotte her with a towel and of how she picked up a kitchen knife to defend herself.2. Inside (part 1) — The woman is in jail thinking of how she failed to take her lawyer's advice to give evidence about her husband's violence, because she did not want to be disloyal.
3. Love — She remembers how she and her husband once loved each other and how things went wrong after their child was born.
Part Two
4. By the Sea — She thinks of how she felt trapped in their house by the sea because she could not talk of his violence.5. Inside (part 2) — She thinks of her husband and of her "heart, broken like bones".
6. Four Walls — She is trapped within the four walls of her house, her husband turning down suggestions of holidays and writing instructions for her in notes.
Part Three
7. Interlude — Instrumental section.8. Landslide — Her husband is buried in land, she in prison.
9. China Cup — She is locked in with only the decorated china cup which she has taken from home to prison.
Performance and recording history
Snape Maltings
Snape Maltings is part of Snape, Suffolk, U.K., best known for its concert hall, which is one of the main sites of the annual Aldeburgh Festival....
Concert Hall during the 50th Aldeburgh Festival
Aldeburgh Festival
The Aldeburgh Festival is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on the main concert hall at Snape Maltings...
. Sally Burgess was accompanied by the ENO Contemporary Opera Studio conducted by Nicholas Kok. The companion piece was the chamber opera
Chamber opera
Chamber opera is a designation for operas written to be performed with a chamber ensemble rather than a full orchestra.The term and form were invented by Benjamin Britten in the 1940s, when the English Opera Group needed works that could easily be taken on tour and performed in a variety of small...
The Country of the Blind which Turnage had composed relatively quickly in order to make up a full programme after Twice had turned out much shorter than originally intended. To Turnage's surprise, ENO decided to follow up the original four performances, split between Snape Maltings and the Queen Elizabeth Hall
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Queen Elizabeth Hall is a music venue on the South Bank in London, United Kingdom that hosts daily classical, jazz, and avant-garde music and dance performances. The QEH forms part of Southbank Centre arts complex and stands alongside the Royal Festival Hall, which was built for the Festival...
, with a staging at its main home in the London Coliseum. This production was premiered on 20 October 1997 with Susan Bickley as the soloist and with Kok again conducting. In this context it was a companion piece for From the House of the Dead
From the House of the Dead
From the House of the Dead is an opera by Leoš Janáček, in three acts. The libretto was translated and adapted by the composer from the novel by Dostoyevsky...
, an opera set in a Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
n prison camp.
Twice had received its mainland European premiere a day earlier than the first Coliseum performance, when it was given by the State Opera in Gießen
Gießen
Gießen, also spelt Giessen is a town in the German federal state of Hesse, capital of both the district of Gießen and the administrative region of Gießen...
, Germany. In 1998, Twice received its North American premiere in Winnipeg
Winnipeg
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
, Canada and was also given in the United States, (by the New York Philharmonic
New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic is a symphony orchestra based in New York City in the United States. It is one of the American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five"...
,) Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these last two countries composer Oliver Knussen
Oliver Knussen
Oliver Knussen CBE is a British composer and conductor.-Biography:Oliver Knussen was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His father, Stuart Knussen, was principal double bass of the London Symphony Orchestra. Oliver Knussen studied composition with John Lambert, between 1963 and 1969 and also received...
conducted. The work has continued to receive international performances, for example by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Chicago, Illinois. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1891, the Symphony makes its home at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and plays a summer season at the Ravinia Festival...
in 2009.
A commercial recording was made in 2007 with Sarah Connolly
Sarah Connolly
Sarah Patricia Connolly CBE is an English mezzo-soprano.Sarah Connolly was educated at Queen Margaret's School, York and then studied piano and singing at the Royal College of Music, of which she is now a Fellow...
singing and Marin Alsop
Marin Alsop
Marin Alsop is an American conductor and violinist. She is the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.In 2012, Alsop will replace Yan Pascal Tortelier as principal conductor of the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra....
conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The London Philharmonic Orchestra , based in London, is one of the major orchestras of the United Kingdom, and is based in the Royal Festival Hall. In addition, the LPO is the main resident orchestra of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera...
. Some live performances have been recorded for broadcast, including one at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the original performers, and the Winnipeg performance.
Reception
In reviewing the first performance for The IndependentThe Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, Nick Kimberley felt that the Twice Through the Heart "w[ore] the scars of a difficult birth" with Sally Burgess "strain[ing] to find specific expression in the sharp angles and steep slides Turnage provided" in a work that Kimberley considered less natural than its relatively quickly written companion piece. For this critic, the instrumental writing came over far more successfully than the vocal part with Kimberley praising the use of colour and finding the "draining" final climax particularly effective. Michael Kennedy
Michael Kennedy (music critic)
Dr. George Michael Sinclair Kennedy CBE is an English biographer, journalist and writer on classical music. He joined the Daily Telegraph at the age of 15 in 1941, and began writing music criticism for it in 1948...
, in contrast to Kimberley, found the scena "the more dramatic and musically more inventive" of the two works performed that night.
Bernard Holland
Bernard Holland
Bernard Holland is an internationally recognized American music critic. He served on the staff of The New York Times from 1981 until 2008 and held the post of chief music critic from 1995, contributing 4,575 articles to the newspaper....
, of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
heard both the Aldeburgh and New York premieres. He noted the influence both of Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
and, in the strings and percussion, of rock music and appreciated a musical language that makes modernism easier on the ears. However, he felt a degree of ambivalence about a composer he described as "theatrical... in both the good and bad senses of the word."
Geoff Brown, reviewing Marin Alsop and Sarah Connolly's recording in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, praised the directness of both Kay's and Turnage's writing and described Twice Through the Heart and its "awful clarity" as "among the best in Turnage's recent output". David Gutman suggested in Gramophone that "if listeners feel uncomfortable with the mix of artful delivery and documentary realism, that may be part of the intended effect." The critics of The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
were later to list this disc among the hundred best classical recordings.
John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
noted the trickiness of the solo part and criticised the "banality" of Kay's verse but reported that he "was held by the sensitive lyrical, rather Bergian vocal writing and often translucent scoring". "The woman's suppressed anger and fear rise to the surface through Turnage's music — poignant gritty yet always compassionate." Considering the same Chicago performance, freelance music critic Lawrence A. Johnson, was taken by the use of instrumental colour and also by Turnage's "whipcrack rhythmic vitality", but "If Twice through the Heart [sic] just misses being one of Turnage's top-drawer works, it's because of the somewhat unvaried air of doleful melancholy as well as the text's more pedestrian moments and repetition."
Not all critics have been hostile to Kay's poetry: reviewing a concert by the London Sinfonietta
London Sinfonietta
The London Sinfonietta is an English chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London. The ensemble specialises in contemporary music and works across a wide range of genres, performing modern classics alongside world premieres, and includes music by electronica artists as well as folk and...
, Nicholas Williams refers to her "arresting text". Whether positive or negative, the music critics only assessed part of Kay's original work. In considering the original television version of Twice, the literary critic Laura Severin, praised the contrasted voices and the use of repetition as an adaptation to a medium where listeners would be less attentive to the words than if they were attending a conventional poetry reading. She also saw Kay's portrayal of Rossiter as one that avoided both a conventional masculine representation of her as a ruthless murderer and an overly simplistic feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
one of her as a passive victim.