Raucous Arsenal fans invade concert hall to hear classical score

Concert halls do not often ring to chanting as if the audience is at a football match, as the Barbican did last week. With tongue in cheek, lifelong Arsenal fan Mark-Anthony Turnage has written a score depicting his team’s league-clinching win over Liverpool in 1989 and a film of the match was shown to go with it.

This new work must have received as much advance publicity as anything in the classical diary this year, and not only in the usual media outlets. A capacity audience turned up, many in Arsenal shirts, and cheered along with the original crowd in the film.

Turnage says that writing Up for Grabs (the title a quote from the TV commentary as the last-minute goal went in the net) was “the most fun I have had in my life”. It certainly felt like that at the premiere of his 25-minute orchestral score.

He took the decision early on not to write music to accompany the entire match. Instead, a film of highlights is synched to a relatively abstract score, though Turnage does allow himself some pictorial amusement, such as the contrabassoon thumbing its nose at a missed shot. A jazz trio is added to the mix, though it only makes a passing impact.

The piece has rhythmic drive to burn and plenty of orchestral colour, as always with Turnage, but it could do with stronger musical ideas in the foreground. If one listens without the film the music alone does not stand up so well, but a successful future could still be in store. Debussy’s ballet Jeux involves a tennis match. Up for Grabs could surely make a good score for dance.

Backed up by the noisy audience, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Bancroft gave the work a rollicking performance, and with sharper ensemble than their Shostakovich and Stravinsky earlier. The concert was broadcast live and can be heard on BBC Sounds.

★★★☆☆

An evening devoted to the music of Huw Watkins at Wigmore Hall was a less raucous affair. The first half included Echo (2017), a short song cycle by Watkins, beautifully written for the voice, its emotions lyrically probed by soprano Ruby Hughes with Watkins himself at the piano.

The main event, though, was his 45-minute chamber opera In the Locked Room (2012), based on a short story by Thomas Hardy. Although it was performed in concert here, the opera wove a palpable spell. Among other haunted-house operas, the locked room of Britten’s Owen Wingrave casts a particularly long shadow, both for its story and even some musical details. Watkins’s opera is a gentler one than that, rooted in a wife’s romantic obsession with a mysterious poet, and the downside is that the score is content to create a spooky atmosphere without ratcheting up much tension.

A fine quartet of singers – Ruby Hughes, Jess Dandy, James Gilchrist and Hank Neven – played the four individuals caught in the mystery’s web. A small instrumental ensemble from the Britten Sinfonia under Andrew Gourlay kept a shiver going lightly down the spine.

★★★☆☆

barbican.org.uk, wigmore-hall.org.uk