Mark Anthony Turnage

Mark-Anthony Turnage proclaimed his individuality with his first published work, Night Dances. His unlikely synthesis of a range of twentieth-century models with the inflections and colours of jazz and soul music have consistently given his works an instantly recognisable voice, while their formal assurance, harmonic imagination and instinctive lyricism have cemented his place in the front rank of composers of his generation. It is Turnage's sequence of orchestral scores, beginning with Three Screaming Popes, inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, and also including Drowned Out, Your Rockaby, the evening-long Blood on the Floor with its solo roles for three jazz musicians, and most recently Silent Cities, that provide the thread of continuity through his development. But his operas - from Greek, a reworking of the Oedipus myth, right up to The Silver Tassie, first performed in February 2000 - show how the dramatic purposefulness and expressive range of his musical language transfer so potently to a much broader canvas.