Harrison Birtwistle (1934 - 2022)

[Pulcinella]

Times obituary here:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/?shareToken=bd528103ed2da8a17f7c91661b8e3398

I'm unable to share a general article from the body of the paper, though.

[Mandryka]

I listened to Punch and Judy last night, first time in many years. It’s an entertaining little opera I think, it has a plot I can follow more or less, at least in the first half, and it has some music which still sounds bold and fresh to me, and many memorable and hummable tunes and foot tappable rhythms. It seems to me to work pretty well with sound only, as well as any opera can, though I certainly wouldn’t mind going to a production.

[gurnemanz]

Just played his Silbury Air on a lovely sunny morning in Wiltshire. The hill in question is a few miles from where we live.

RIP

[Quarky]

Well, Silbury Air isn't exactly what I imagined it to be, Birtwistle having a more abstract view.

Nevertheless, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group have put together some worksheets for students, which I found very enlightening as to Birtwistle's methods of composition::

https://resources.bcmg.org.uk/music-maze/silbury-air

[silvestrione]

Maybe this is a good intro to his music, the film music for Sidney Lumet's"The Offence"

Or there's the remarkable music he did for Tony Harrison's Oresteia, while at the National under Peter Hall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdv3vkECqXA

[edashtav]

One of my favourite composers, unusual-sounding as that may seem coming from the Romantic that is me. One of those composers whose idiom I never have quite worked out, but which has always made sense in some inexplicable way for me. […].

One of my favourites, too. I first encountered Harri and his music, the rather atypical Refrains and Choruses, in the Barber Institute around 1966. Perhaps for the only time in his life, young Harri was ‘trendy’ as he sported a bootlace tie. I think I’ve hear more first performances of works by Birtwistle than by any other contemporary composer. I was there when the ISCM paid tribute to him in its Manchester Festival [the extended Pulse Shadows]. And my favourite piece is… Silbury Air.

[RichardB]

I'm very fond of Silbury Air too. But here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsRhm9z6Zsk

is another one I like, the seminal Tragoedia - this video has just been uploaded, it's from the first performance of the work in Serbia which took place last November (!).

[silvestrione]

I'm very fond of Silbury Air too. But here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsRhm9z6Zsk

is another one I like, the seminal Tragoedia - this video has just been uploaded, it's from the first performance of the work in Serbia which took place last November (!).

The Aarhus Sinfonietta can be heard in Ritual Fragment...his music has travelled!

Amongst the early works I prefer Verses for Ensembles -- it has an extraordinary part for timps and drums, the outbreaks interspersed with what i presume are the 'verses', passages for winds and brass. It's a Birtwistlian 'symphony of wind instruments'....slightly spiky and 'tough' I suppose, though with chorale-like passages, too.

[Joseph K]

It's a Birtwistlian 'symphony of wind instruments'....slightly spiky and 'tough' I suppose, though with chorale-like passages, too.

... That piece having the most influence on Birtwistle, I think.

[silvestrione]

... That piece having the most influence on Birtwistle, I think.

Yes, well-documented, I believe.

[ostuni]

I was reminded today of what I think was the first piece of Birtwistle's that I heard live: the abrasively dramatic Down by the Greenwood Side at a marvellous Prom in 1972 which made a big impression on the 19-yr-old me (watching a snippet of a rehearsal on YouTube of a 2009 ROH Linbury Studio production just now, I was amazed at how well I remembered the piece).

Prom 38 included the Proms premieres of that piece, as well as of Weill's Mahagonny-Songspiel, Schoenberg's 1st Chamber Symphony (!), and Tavener's Celtic Requiem - and Stravinsky's Octet. A super line-up: Jenny Hill singing Mrs Green in the Birtwistle; Annie Ross, Cleo Laine, Gerald English, Robert Tear, Raymundo Herincx, Michael Rippon in the Weill, and (of course) the London Sinfonietta/Atherton.

[Lordgeous]

Those were the days!

[silvestrione]

I was reminded today of what I think was the first piece of Birtwistle's that I heard live: the abrasively dramatic Under the Greenwood Tree, at a marvellous Prom in 1972 which made a big impression on the 19-yr-old me (watching a snippet of a rehearsal on YouTube of a 2009 ROH Linbury Studio production just now, I was amazed at how well I remembered the piece).

Prom 38 included the Proms premieres of that piece, as well as of Weill's Mahagonny-Songspiel, Schoenberg's 1st Chamber Symphony (!), and Tavener's Celtic Requiem - and Stravinsky's Octet. A super line-up: Jenny Hill singing Mrs Green in the Birtwistle; Annie Ross, Cleo Laine, Gerald English, Robert Tear, Raymundo Herincx, Michael Rippon in the Weill, and (of course) the London Sinfonietta/Atherton.

'Down by the Greenwood Side'?

[ostuni]

Whoops - thanks! Editing…

[RichardB]

Amongst the early works I prefer Verses for Ensembles

I like that one very much too, although it suffers a bit in live performance from the distraction of having musicians walk around to different places while others are continuing to play, which is something I've never liked, mainly because musicians are never trained (like actors would be) to know the most elegant and unobtrusive way to do something like that, so they tend to do it somewhat clumsily and selfconsciously. In any case I would prefer to concentrate on the sounds.