Harrison Birtwistle (1934 - 2022)

[ahinton]

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.

I seem to recall that there something similar in Thea Musgrave's clarinet concerto and Colin Matthews' horn concerto; I must confess that I also have doubts about it in practice...

[Pulcinella]

I seem to recall that there something similar in Thea Musgrave's clarinet concerto and Colin Matthews' horn concerto; I must confess that I also have doubts about it in practice...

And the horn in Messiaen's Des canyons, I think, though I see no mention of it in the liner notes of the recording I have.

[EnemyoftheStoat]

I seem to recall that there something similar in Thea Musgrave's clarinet concerto and Colin Matthews' horn concerto; I must confess that I also have doubts about it in practice...

There was a Thea Musgrave piece at a Prom a few years back that featured a confrontation between horn and timpanist, ending with the latter stalking off stage waving his sticks. I found it rather silly.

[TBuckley]

Special Birtwistle tribute edition of the New Music Show this evening:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016jr8

Tom Service pays tribute to Sir Harrison Birtwistle with a selection from the composer's vast output that encompasses opera, orchestral music, chamber and ensemble works. From the earliest opera Punch and Judy to the monumental and dramatic Earth Dances, and recent works including The Moth Requiem and Duet for Eight Strings, in recordings by some of the artists and ensembles closely associated with the composer.

Seems fair enough for radio - despite his sometime presentational issues, Service knows what he's talking about.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be nothing in the TV schedules. They could easily find room, about an hour, for this program centred on Birtwistle's Triumph of Time from 1999:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/28671402c80e4065b277eb93edcbe9a7

I recently watched my off-air recording and it really is a superb programme - the sort of thing the BBC used to do well, and maybe still can.

[Mandryka]

This one, Endless Parade, makes me think of Rihm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36kuaKRDGxc&ab_channel=H%C3%A5kanHardenberger-Topic

[Mandryka]

The video recording of The Minotaur is well worth a look. It's a straightforward narrative, linear. The music calls Elektra to mind in the first half, in that it's visceral, tuneful. It has started to make me think about Birtwistle's relationship to past musics, the tradition.

Let me recommend The Minotaur, it works well in the DVD and is very easy, accessible from the point of structure and musical style.

[Bryn]

The video recording of The Minotaur is well worth a look. It's a straightforward narrative, linear. The music calls Elektra to mind in the first half, in that it's visceral, tuneful. It has started to make me think about Birtwistle's relationship to past musics, the tradition.

Let me recommend The Minotaur, it works well in the DVD and is very easy, accessible from the point of structure and musical style.

If one has the wherewithal to play it, I would strongly recommend the Blu-ray for its superior audio (LCPM 2-channel stereo, as with the DVD, or DTS-HD 5.0 Master Audio).

[RichardB]

Some considerable time ago, I mean 30 years at least, there was an interesting HB-centred festival on the South Bank which explored, alongside his own work (and presumably with his approval), music by some of the composers who were influential on him - Messiaen (obviously! especially in Verses for Ensembles), Xenakis, Stockhausen, Machaut are names I remember, probably because these would also be on my own list of suspects if I ever made one.

Regarding his theatre works, a colleague recently observed that those written with librettists who weren't principally concerned with writing words (Down by the Greenwood Side with Michael Nyman, Punch and Judy with Stephen Pruslin and The Mask of Orpheus with Peter Zinovieff) make all the others look disappointingly linear and conventional in comparison, an impression I remember very strongly from attending the premiere of Gawain, which I had as they say eagerly anticipated but which I came out of thinking well that was just an opera. Which of course is absolutely fine for many people! (The Second Mrs Kong sits in a strange position between the operas and non-operas, which makes it very interesting too.)

[Mandryka]

Here's Yan Tan Tethera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvHAMRxg7gc&t=7182s&ab_channel=TomWeston

I like what I'm hearing and seeing.

[silvestrione]

Some considerable time ago, I mean 30 years at least, there was an interesting HB-centred festival on the South Bank which explored, alongside his own work (and presumably with his approval), music by some of the composers who were influential on him - Messiaen (obviously! especially in Verses for Ensembles), Xenakis, Stockhausen, Machaut are names I remember, probably because these would also be on my own list of suspects if I ever made one.

Regarding his theatre works, a colleague recently observed that those written with librettists who weren't principally concerned with writing words (Down by the Greenwood Side with Michael Nyman, Punch and Judy with Stephen Pruslin and The Mask of Orpheus with Peter Zinovieff) make all the others look disappointingly linear and conventional in comparison, an impression I remember very strongly from attending the premiere of Gawain, which I had as they say eagerly anticipated but which I came out of thinking well that was just an opera. Which of course is absolutely fine for many people! (The Second Mrs Kong sits in a strange position between the operas and non-operas, which makes it very interesting too.)

I do think Gawain an impressive work, though it does make me yearn for HB in a more stripped-down mode, such as in The Io Passion, which I saw in Snape, but seems to have dropped out of sight. I would also like to see The Last Supper, which hasn't done very well either? The Mask Of Orpheus is baffling but wonderful, or bafflingly wonderful, and if Zinovieff's barmy libretto played a role in stimulating such a unique work, so be it...I went to a concert performance of the Kong opera, and could make nothing of it. Nenia, the Death of Orpheus, is a very beautiful piece from 1970, with a recording by Jane Manning (and another with Rosemary Hardy).

[Pulcinella]

Wednesday 24 August 2022, as the precursor to Mahler's Resurrection at the Proms (LSO/Rattle):

Harrison Birtwistle
Donum Simoni MMXVIII (4 mins)

Preplanned, or snuck in (in time to get into the printed copy if it is?) after HB's death?

[RichardB]

Yan Tan Tethera

I saw that in its first production, at the QEH. I don't think I've listened to it since then. I found the music beautiful but I didn't have much idea about what was going on. I'm not really much of a fan of Tony Harrison's cod-archaic (or sub-Ted Hughes) mode of expression (also in his version of the Oresteia with music by HB).

[Mandryka]

Listening today to the string quartet, The Tree of Strings, it struck me that this would be good choreographed, some movement to bring out the dramatic gestures. Birtwistle, like Rihm, often has one foot in the theatre of cruelty I think: a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself.

[silvestrione]

Listening today to the string quartet, The Tree of Strings, it struck me that this would be good choreographed, some movement to bring out the dramatic gestures. Birtwistle, like Rihm, often has one foot in the theatre of cruelty I think: a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself.

You know, I expect, that in performance (at least when I was there, in Snape) , at the end the players leave one by one, leaving just the cello? So evocative...

Though I see you are thinking of rather more than that.

[Mandryka]

You know, I expect, that in performance (at least when I was there, in Snape) , at the end the players leave one by one, leaving just the cello? So evocative...

Though I see you are thinking of rather more than that.

Indeed, I was thinking of something MUCH MUCH more than that!