Sakari Oramo’s Prom of English music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra opened with the overdue UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Time Flies. A co-commission by the BBC, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie, it was written in 2019 as a celebratory piece for the Tokyo Olympics the following year, though its planned multiple premieres were all initially shelved due to Covid and subsequent travel restrictions. The first performance finally took place in Hamburg last year. Tokyo, for which the world premiere was originally intended, has still yet to hear it.
A large-scale piece lasting 25 minutes or so, it’s essentially a depiction of the three cities that commissioned it: structurally it flanks a slow central movement (Hamburg) with two contrasting allegros (London, Tokyo), each effectively dictated by its own pulse and individual time pattern. London is all about rhythmic disorientation as Turnage rings syncopated changes on a horn phrase that suggests a peal of church bells, though a lyrical soprano saxophone solo over undulating strings at the movement’s centre suggests the calm, steady flow of the Thames through the at times gleeful surrounding chaos.
