Muhly’s Work On Alan Turing Premieres
The Guardian writes: ‘Though opinions about Nico Muhly (pictured)’s music differ, it is a measure of his standing and popularity that two major premieres of his work can take place over a single weekend. The day after the Philadelphia Orchestra brought “Mixed Messages” to London’s Royal Festival Hall, the Britten Sinfonia gave the first performance of “Sentences,” a meditation on the life of Alan Turing, which was written for countertenor Iestyn Davies. It is the more substantial and more ambitious of the two works. Setting an elliptical text by Adam Gopnik, Sentences ranges over Turing’s work as code-breaker, computer scientist and philosopher, the loss of his first love, Christopher Morcom, to bovine tuberculosis, and Turing’s sudden death – possibly at his own hand – some years after his conviction for gross indecency, at a time when sex between men was a criminal offence. It is an immense subject that can feel unduly cramped, its surfaces sometimes skimmed, in the work’s 35-minute span.’
