Harrison Birtwistle News
English composer (1934–2022)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Harrison Birtwistle)
- opera
- United Kingdom
- composer, music teacher, film score composer
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2024-03-19
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2024-03-15 06:00:00
Symphony No. 10 (1971-1972) Not since Harrison Birtwistle’s Exody have i had so much trepidation writing about an orchestral piece. Pettersson’s Symphony No. 10 picks up the baton from No. 9 and doesn’t just run with it, but positively sprints for a full 25 minutes. That in itself makes the… The post appeared first on 5:4. 5:4 is on Patreon! Please consider supporting the blog by becoming a Patron from just $2 a month: https://www.patreon.com/5against4
2024-03-08 11:10:00
Pierre Boulez SaalJonathan Harvey: String Quartet no.1 (1977) Cathy Milliken: In Speak for string quartet (2023, world premiere) Toshio Hosokawa: Oreksis for piano quintet (2023, world premiere) Birtwistle: String Quartet: The Tree of Strings (2007)Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)Ralf Ehlers (viola)Lucas Fels (cello) Tomoki Kitamura (piano) On 7 March 1974, the Arditti Quartet gave its first concert at the Royal Academy of Music, music to honour Krzysztof Penderecki on bestowal of an honorary degree. Fifty years later to the day and several changes of personnel later – Irvine Arditti the one constant – the Quartet celebrated at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal its fiftieth birthday, followed by a reception hosted by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, which also hosts the ensemble’s archive . True to its spirit, here was a mixture of new and newer: two Arditti commissions, Jonathan Harvey’s First String Quartet (the first ever) and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings […]
2024-03-04 07:33:00
Musical strengths, visual confusion & two Rakes: English Touring Opera's new production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress
[…] English Touring Opera (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)Director Polly Graham (artistic director of Longborough Festival) and designer April Dalton deliberately approach the work from a different direction, which seems to have arisen from a close reading of Auden and Kallman's text. The opening scene was a May Day celebration, albeit one so over-designed that it might have been from schlock horror film, and with the Punch and Judy theatre, there seemed deliberate, if puzzling, references to Birtwistle's 1960s operas Punch and Judy and Down by the Greenwood side. Masks and animal heads were a feature here, and in later scenes in London when the ensemble were depicted as rats (again, from a close reading of the libretto). Dalton's set was a multi-level, stage within a stage and the whole production played with an element of theatre that was rather unresolved. Overall, Dalton's designs for set and costumes seemed to reflect Graham's somewhat scattershot […]
2023-10-30 17:47:00
Neuburger/Boulez Ensemble/Roth - Debussy and Manoury, 29 October 2023
[…] to Boulez and even to Manoury. The Interlude, somehow both darker and brighter, registered with proper contrast. Debussy’s use of the harp fascinated all the more in performance, as it encouraged the viola and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the harp to expand their means, and initiated transformations of material and mood. Likewise in the finale, beginning in almost ‘classical’ style before taking other paths, not necessarily sequential: another anticipation of the future, bringing Birtwistle as well as Boulez to my mind. The piano moved centre-stage to Manoury’s 1994 Passacaille pour Tokyo, for piano and seventeen instruments. A similar reinvention of an old form, albeit with more overt éclat, is here founded upon repetition of a note, first E-flat, to which we feel a need to return and indeed continue to hear even when the actual note of repetition has changed. It offers proliferation in a way that […]
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