Not being a string player himself, Mark-Anthony Turnage approached his first concerto for a string instrument with some trepidation. It turns out that while the writing for the viola is idiomatic enough, Turnage has something of a love/hate relationship with traditional ideas about the concerto. Divided into two movements – Turnage admitted that in the unlikely event of his writing a symphony it would have three, five or six movements, never four – the new concerto (completed in 2001 and here given its UK première) has the expected cadenza but one that appears only 36 bars in! Such challenging attitudes to an old form characterize the new piece, subtitled On Opened Ground. Even so the work's structure – scherzando opening with slower coda, slow second movement and brisk chaconne finale – bring us back to the more usual reference points for a concerto. While he acknowledges the surprising influence of Walton ‘in the second movement’, the influence of that composer's own viola concerto is actually more pervasive than Turnage would have us believe. Even the title, while apparently making reference to Seamus Heaney's collection Opened Ground, seems to point more fruitfully to the ground bass of the second movement's chaconne. One thing is certainly as described: On Opened Ground is, as he claims, one of Turnage's most lyrical pieces and might win him an audience for whom the earlier astrigencies were too great.