Ashes Are Burning found the sound. Turn of the Cards darkened it. This is the album where Renaissance stopped being pastoral and started being grave: an orchestra properly deployed for the first time, six songs about time, confusion and endurance, and a closing tribute to a man who had written about surviving a Soviet labour camp. It is also the last record they built out of other people’s music. Many fans will tell you it is the best thing they ever made, and they have a case.

The short version

Turn of the Cards is the fifth Renaissance album and the second by the classic line-up of Annie Haslam, Michael Dunford, John Tout, Jon Camp and Terence Sullivan, with Betty Thatcher writing all the words. It was recorded in March 1974 at De Lane Lea in Wembley — the same Wembley room where Ashes Are Burning was made a year earlier — with Dick Plant producing and engineering and Jimmy Horowitz arranging the orchestra. In Britain it carried the catalogue number BTM 1000: the band had left Sovereign for Miles Copeland’s new label, and this was the very first record it released. America got it on Sire in the summer of 1974, where it reached number ninety-four and stayed on the chart for twenty-one weeks — the commercial breakthrough that the American touring of the previous year had set up.

The last of the borrowings

Three albums into the Haslam era, Renaissance were still assembling their records partly from material that was not theirs, and Turn of the Cards is the end of that habit — the final album to lift passages from existing classical works. The opening piano figure of Running Hard is adapted from Litanies, a piece written for organ by the French composer Jehan Alain. Cold Is Being takes its music wholesale from the Adagio in G minor universally credited to Albinoni, which is itself one of music’s better jokes: it was written in the twentieth century by the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto and attributed to an eighteenth-century composer. Neither borrowing is credited as a composition on the sleeve, though both are thanked in the back notes. There is a third quotation, and it is the loveliest. The instrumental middle of Running Hard reuses a melodic phrase from Mr. Pine — a song from Illusion, recorded by a completely different Renaissance in 1970. Almost nobody in Britain had heard it: Illusion had never been released there. The band was quoting its own buried past to an audience that did not know the past existed. Things I Don’t Understand closes the circle: written years earlier with Jim McCarty, it is the founder’s last contribution to the band he started.

The sound

Bigger budget, bigger canvas, darker weather. Horowitz’s orchestrations — cellos, xylophone, timpani — are lavish and windy, and for the first time the orchestra is structural rather than decorative. Tout dominates, moving between grand piano, pipe organ and electric harpsichord with a concert player’s command. Camp’s trebly Rickenbacker functions as the second lead voice, and his contribution to the writing was larger than the credits admit, as he has said himself. Sullivan plays like a symphonic percussionist rather than a rock drummer, conversing with the piano rather than bulldozing it. Dunford’s acoustic guitar accompanies and never solos — there is not a guitar solo anywhere on this album. Above it all Haslam is at the peak of her control. The mood is the change: where Ashes Are Burning was sunlit, this is cold, formal and often sad, and it suits them.

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The songs

Running Hard opens with that dramatic solo piano and then races: nine and a half minutes of choral harmonies and orchestral drive over a Thatcher lyric about chasing what has already gone. I Think of You is a short, warm breath. Things I Don’t Understand is the album’s hidden giant, nine minutes of bass melody, piano and mounting anguish, and one of Thatcher’s finest sets of words. Black Flame is stately and consuming, carried by electric harpsichord, and remains a favourite among people who know the catalogue well. Cold Is Being sets Haslam against a lone cathedral pipe organ, singing the Adagio as a song — a genuine vocal feat, and the one track that divides listeners, since not everyone wants words attached to that melody. Then Mother Russia, the closer and the reason many people own this album: a tribute to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, drawn from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a man reduced to a number and enduring anyway. Thatcher wrote it after the book moved her, the band wrote music to match the cold, and Haslam sings it with a restraint that makes it land harder.

Reception and legacy

America noticed. Ninety-fourth is not a triumph, but twenty-one weeks on the chart is, and it established the audience that would fill Carnegie Hall two years later. In Britain, as usual, comparatively little happened. Among fans the album has aged into something close to a favourite: it sits at the top of most rankings alongside Ashes Are Burning and Scheherazade and Other Stories, and Mother Russia, Running Hard and Things I Don’t Understand form a trio that no other Renaissance album quite matches for consistency. Its place in the story is precise. Prologue found the players, Ashes Are Burning found the sound, Turn of the Cards found the ambition — and having exhausted the classical borrowings here, the band went away and wrote Song of Scheherazade entirely from scratch. Everything they are remembered for runs through this record.

The verdict

One of the three essentials, and arguably the one to buy second. It has no epic to test your patience and no weak track to skip, which is more than can be said for anything else in the catalogue. Mother Russia is the summit: play it once for the melody and again for the words. Running Hard is the best opening two minutes the band ever recorded. Black Flame deserves far more attention than it gets. If Ashes Are Burning is the album that makes you love Renaissance, this is the one that makes you take them seriously.

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